00:00Daria isn't just a heritage site, it's also a gigaproject, and I just wonder, what was the thinking behind making
00:07it a gigaproject?
00:08Yes, so we knew that in the economic terms of Vision 2030, that tourism would play a big role, and
00:16that tourism would go from 3% of GDP to 10% of GDP.
00:20Now, if you're going to do that, you have a very, very big country, because if you look at the
00:25Gulf states, they're relatively small geographically.
00:28They can all fit into the size of the state of California and America, where I'm from.
00:33However, Saudi is five times the size of that, right?
00:36So you have a big country, you have water in the Persian Gulf, you have the Great Red Sea, you
00:41have UNESCO World Heritage Site.
00:42So we knew that in order to get to 100 million visits, which is now 150 million visits, that you
00:51had to have all the amenities to draw people.
00:54So we didn't want to just restore the UNESCO site.
00:58We needed to build 42 hotels, hundreds of retail, restaurants, but we wanted it to have a 24-hour energy,
01:08young people praying, going to school, working, people visiting.
01:13So that meant to put together a giga project, a master plan, that could cater to 100,000 people, 24
01:21hours a day, seven days a week, to give it an urban energy.
01:24And that's why the original plan that was come up with Israel, 400,000 square meters, went to the 14
01:33million square meters it is now,
01:35because it has all the amenities associated with urban lifestyle, but in a walkable, pedestrian-friendly way.
01:54So you ...
02:02You
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