RihlayaHeritage journeys
Register interest

Pre-launch · first departures planned for spring 2027

Twelve people, one historian, and a town that is not a set.

Small-group heritage journeys through the Levant, North Africa and Andalusia — designed with local historians, and booked directly with the people who host them.

See the journeys Read where the money goes
Group size
8–12travellers, never more
Pace
3 nightsminimum at every base
Stays in region
76%on our illustrative costing
An illustrated hill town with a colonnaded arcade in the foreground A drawn townscape: terraced hillsides above a cluster of flat-roofed houses, a square minaret and a small dome, cypresses and palms, and in the foreground a wall of five horseshoe arches standing on a tiled ground line. A dashed route curves across the hills with three marked stops.

Drawn, not photographed. Every image on this site is a line drawing made in-house — we would rather show you nothing than show you a stock photograph of somebody else’s town.

The state of things

Cultural travel here is sold in two shapes, and neither of them is the one you wanted.

We are not being rude about the industry for sport. We are describing the gap we intend to sit in, and you should be able to judge whether we have described it fairly.

A coach parked beside a monument, with a queue of small figures

The coach tour

Forty seats, a monument at nine and another at eleven, lunch at a hotel that could be in any country. The guiding is a script somebody else wrote. The money is collected in one capital and spent in another, and the towns people actually live in slide past the window between ruins.

A lone figure with a rucksack in front of a tangle of unmarked paths

The improvisation

You go alone, you read what you can, and you stand in front of something extraordinary with nobody to ask. The guides who could have told you are on a rank outside a gate, competing on price with people who memorised a leaflet. Depth is available. It just is not findable.

Travellers who want depth cannot find it. Guides who have it cannot reach them. That is a marketplace failure, not a taste failure — and it is fixable.

What we build instead

Four decisions, taken before anyone books.

A Rihlaya journey is not assembled from a supplier catalogue. It is built backwards from a subject and a person, and everything downstream — the beds, the pace, the price — follows from those two.

Step one

A subject, not a country

We start with a question worth eleven days — what a Roman provincial town actually earned, how a waqf endowment paid for a university, what happened to a craft after the border moved. The map follows the question.

Step two

The person who knows it

An archaeologist, a historian, an architectural conservator or a master craftsperson who works on that question — not a tour manager with an interest. They lead the journey personally, and they are named on the journey page before booking opens.

Step three

Beds booked, not brokered

Family-run guesthouses, riads and small hotels, contracted by us directly and paid directly — no bed bank, no consolidator taking a cut in the middle. The house you sleep in is named on the itinerary, with who runs it.

Step four

The arithmetic, published

Every journey page carries the cost breakdown: the leader’s fee, the guesthouses, the local guides and drivers, the ground costs, and what Rihlaya keeps. If we cannot defend a line of it in public, it should not be in the price.

The first season

Six journeys, being built now.

These are the routes we are contracting for the first season. Itineraries are drafted, houses are being confirmed, and leaders are being appointed. Prices are indicative and land-only; departure months are planned rather than open for sale. Register interest and you will hear when a journey opens, before it is advertised anywhere else.

Planned · Apr 2027 A Roman colonnaded street curving around an oval plaza, with a square desert castle beyond

Jordan

The Decapolis and the Desert Castles

Jerash, Umm Qais and Amman’s citadel hill, then east to Qusayr ‘Amra and Qasr Kharana — asking what a Roman provincial city actually paid for, and what the Umayyads were doing out in the steppe.

Led by An archaeologist working on urbanism in the Roman and early Islamic Near East. Named on this page when the appointment is signed.

  • Length11 nights · 3 bases
  • Group8–12 travellers
  • PaceModerate walking, hot afternoons free

€3,850per person, land only

Register interest
Planned · May 2027 Two tiers of banded horseshoe arches above a terraced hillside with cypresses

Spain · Andalusia

Andalusia After 1492

Córdoba, Granada and the villages of the Alpujarras — not the golden-age tour, but what happened next: conversion, expulsion, reuse, and the long argument about who the buildings belong to now.

Led by A historian of medieval and early-modern Iberia, with a second specialist joining for the Alpujarras days.

  • Length9 nights · 3 bases
  • Group8–12 travellers
  • PaceCity walking; two hill days, optional

€3,200per person, land only

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Planned · Oct 2027 Stacked medina rooftops above a grid of round tannery vats, with an eight-point tile star

Morocco

Fez, the Middle Atlas and the Craft Quarters

Ten nights across three bases: the Qarawiyyin quarter and the tanneries, Sefrou and the cedar plateau, then Volubilis and Meknes. The journey costed out in full further down this page.

Led by An architectural conservator who has worked on Marinid-period buildings, joined for three days by a master craftsperson in the workshops.

  • Length10 nights · 3 bases
  • Group8–12 travellers
  • PaceMedina walking on uneven ground

€3,200per person, land only

See the itinerary
Planned · Sep 2027 Standing columns on a harbour headland above ruled sea lines, with a cedar tree

Lebanon

The Phoenician Coast

Byblos, Sidon and Tyre, the Qadisha valley and Beiteddine — a coastline read as a trading system rather than a set of sites, and what four thousand years of harbour economics leaves behind.

Led by A Levantine archaeologist specialising in maritime trade, with a local guide resident on the coast throughout.

  • Length9 nights · 3 bases
  • Group8–12 travellers
  • PaceCoastal walking; one mountain day

€3,450per person, land only

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Planned · Mar 2028 A square minaret above a crenellated courtyard wall with an arcade running along it

Tunisia

Carthage, Kairouan and the Sahel

From the Punic ports and the Bardo mosaics to Kairouan’s Great Mosque, the ribats of Monastir and Sousse, and the olive economy that paid for all of it.

Led by A specialist in North African late antiquity and early Islamic architecture, working with a Kairouan-based guide.

  • Length10 nights · 3 bases
  • Group8–12 travellers
  • PaceGentle; the most accessible route

€2,950per person, land only

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Planned · Nov 2027 Two slender minarets above a latticed mashrabiya screen, with palms and a lake beyond

Egypt

The Fatimid City and the Fayoum

Eight nights between Cairo’s medieval core — al-Muizz street, Ibn Tulun, the Northern Cemetery — and the Fayoum: irrigation, portraiture, and the pottery villages still working the lake edge.

Led by An Islamic art historian focused on Fatimid and Mamluk Cairo, with a Fayoum-based ceramicist hosting two days.

  • Length8 nights · 2 bases
  • Group8–12 travellers
  • PaceDense city walking; long midday breaks

€2,400per person, land only

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A note on what “planned” means. No Rihlaya journey has run yet. Every date above is a target month for a first departure, not an open booking. When a journey is confirmed — leader signed, houses contracted, dates fixed — the page changes to show the names, the addresses, and the full costing, and only then does it open.

The pace

Three nights, minimum, before you move.

Most cultural tours move every night or two, because moving looks like value on a brochure. It is the single biggest reason people come home exhausted and remember nothing. We fix the minimum at three nights per base, which means fewer places and considerably more of each.

Sample itinerary · Morocco

Fez, the Middle Atlas and the Craft Quarters

Drafted, not yet contracted. Houses and the leader are named on the live page when confirmed.

Nights
10
Bases
3
Moves
2
Indicative
€3,200
Route diagram of the ten-night Morocco itinerary A left-to-right route line with three base stops: Fez for four nights on days one to five, Sefrou and the Middle Atlas for three nights on days five to eight, and Moulay Idriss with Meknes and Volubilis for three nights on days eight to eleven. Two transfer legs sit between the bases, each about two hours by road. Transfer · ~2 hrs Transfer · ~2 hrs 4 NIGHTS Fez Days 1–5 Medina & Qarawiyyin 3 NIGHTS Sefrou Days 5–8 Middle Atlas & workshops 3 NIGHTS Moulay Idriss Days 8–11 Volubilis & Meknes Arrive Depart

Base one · 4 nights

Fez

  • Day 1Arrive and settle. An evening walk to the medina’s upper gate, then dinner at the guesthouse where the leader sets out the argument of the week.
  • Day 2The Qarawiyyin quarter on foot — the mosque-university precinct, the Attarine and Bou Inania madrasas, and how a religious endowment funded a city’s scholarship for eight centuries.
  • Day 3Morning with the tanners’ cooperative and the leather souk. Afternoon free through the heat. Evening seminar on Marinid patronage, with the drawings out on the table.
  • Day 4The Mellah, the cemetery and the palace gates; the Batha collections. A reading afternoon — nothing scheduled, deliberately.
  • Day 5Slow morning at the guesthouse. Transfer south after lunch.

Base two · 3 nights

Sefrou & the Middle Atlas

  • Day 5Arrive Sefrou. The walled medina at dusk, and the orchards it was built to serve.
  • Day 6Bhalil’s cave houses in the morning; the afternoon in a braid-and-button workshop, the craft this town has traded on for generations — sitting down and actually trying it.
  • Day 7Up to the cedar forest and the plateau: transhumance, grazing rights, and a long lunch with the family whose summer ground it is.
  • Day 8The weekly market at first light. Transfer west before the heat.

Base three · 3 nights

Moulay Idriss

  • Day 8Arrive and climb to the terrace for the town at dusk — the whole of the Zerhoun laid out below.
  • Day 9Volubilis, early and empty: the mosaics, the olive presses, and a proper accounting of what a Roman provincial town actually earned.
  • Day 10Meknes — Bab Mansour, the granaries and the stables. Alaouite ambition at a scale that never quite got finished. Final dinner in town.
  • Day 11Departure transfers to Fez airport, timed around afternoon flights.

Two moves in eleven days. Four unscheduled half-days. Nothing before eight in the morning and nothing that requires you to be anywhere at all on day four — because the point of staying is to stop being a visitor for an afternoon.

Where the money goes

The page nobody else in cultural travel will publish.

Here is how a €3,200 seat is costed, line by line, before anyone has paid anything. It is the same arithmetic that will sit on every journey page — and if a line of it embarrasses us, that is a reason to change the line, not to hide the page.

  • The houses are paid directly. We contract each guesthouse ourselves and pay them ourselves, in local currency, on terms they agreed. No bed bank sits in the middle taking fifteen per cent for a booking screen.
  • The leader is paid a fee, not a commission. A flat professional fee per journey, agreed in advance, that does not move with how many seats sell. Nobody should be incentivised to squeeze a thirteenth person in.
  • Our own margin is on the chart. Nineteen per cent covers planning, contracting, the office, insurance administration and the fact that somebody answers the telephone at two in the morning when a flight is cancelled. It is not a rounding error and we are not going to draw it as one.

Read this as a worked example, not a receipt. No journey has run, so no money has moved. These are the figures our Morocco costing model produces at ten seats sold on an eleven-day route. Real journeys will vary by a few points either way with exchange rates, group size and season — and when they do, the published figure will be the real one, not this one.

Basis
€3,200
Journey
10 nights
Seats sold
10
Stays in region
76%
Illustrative breakdown of a €3,200 journey seat A stacked bar divided into seven parts totalling one hundred per cent. Guesthouses and family-run lodging 27 per cent, or 864 euro. Cooks, hosts and workshops 9 per cent, 288 euro. The journey leader's fee 13 per cent, 416 euro. Local guides, drivers, permits and site fees 19 per cent, 608 euro. Regional transport and ground logistics 8 per cent, 256 euro. Payment fees, insurance and financial bonding 5 per cent, 160 euro. Rihlaya's planning, staffing and operating margin 19 per cent, 608 euro. Seventy-six per cent of the seat price stays with people and businesses in the region; twenty-four per cent does not. The same figures are listed in the table beneath this chart. ONE SEAT · €3,200 27% 9% 13% 19% 8% 5% 19% 76% stays in the region €2,432 — houses, hosts, leader, guides, transport 24% does not €768 — fees, bonding, Rihlaya Illustrative costing · ten seats sold · land only · no journey has yet run
The same figures, in full
Where it goes Share Of €3,200
Guesthouses and family-run lodging 27%€864
Cooks, hosts and craft workshops 9%€288
The journey leader’s fee 13%€416
Local guides, drivers, permits and site fees 19%€608
Regional transport and ground logistics 8%€256
Payment fees, insurance and financial bonding 5%€160
Rihlaya — planning, staffing, operating margin 19%€608
Total 100%€3,200

Who leads

We will name them. We are not going to invent them.

Every journey is led by a named subject specialist, and that name — with their institution, their fieldwork and what they have published — sits on the journey page before booking opens. Appointments are being made now. Until a contract is signed, we will show you the shape of the role and nothing more. A plausible-looking biography under a plausible-looking photograph is exactly the thing this company exists to be an alternative to.

Role one

The field archaeologist

Someone who has spent seasons on a site in the region and can tell you what the trench actually showed, where the interpretation is contested, and which bit of the signage is thirty years out of date.

Leads: the Jordan and Lebanon journeys. Appointment in progress — name, institution and bibliography published here on signature.

Role two

The architectural conservator

A practitioner who has repaired the buildings you are standing in — who reads a wall as a sequence of decisions and repairs, and who knows what a restoration budget can and cannot buy.

Leads: the Morocco and Tunisia journeys. Appointment in progress — name and portfolio published here on signature.

Role three

The working craftsperson

Not a demonstrator. A person whose living is the craft — zellij, tanning, ceramics, weaving — hosting two or three days of a journey in their own workshop, paid at a professional day rate for it.

Joins: every journey, for part of it. Hosts named on the itinerary alongside their workshop.

What you will be able to check before you pay. The leader’s name and where they work. The name and address of every house you will sleep in. The name of the local guide travelling with you. The costing above, for that specific journey. If any of those four is missing from a journey page, the journey is not open yet — and you should not be able to give us money for it.

Pricing

Per seat, per journey, land only.

Every price on this site excludes flights, and includes everything on the itinerary — rooms, all breakfasts and most other meals, ground transport, entries, the leader, the local guides, and the reading. Deposits are refundable until the journey is confirmed to run.

Shared journey

Eight to twelve travellers, fixed departure

€2,400–€4,800

per person · 8 to 12 nights · land only

  • A named subject specialist leading throughout
  • Family-run guesthouses, named on the itinerary
  • Three nights minimum at every base
  • Reading list and a briefing paper before departure
  • Published costing for that journey
Register interest

Private departure

Your family, or your friends, on your dates

From €18,000

whole journey · up to 12 travellers · land only

  • Any published route, on dates you choose
  • Built for multigenerational groups — pace, rooms, rest days
  • Diaspora returns: we will work around family visits and home towns
  • Same published costing, quoted for your group
Ask for a quote

Institutional

Alumni, museum and members’ programmes

Quoted

per programme · multi-departure terms available

  • Journeys designed around a curriculum or a collection
  • Your own academic can co-lead with ours
  • Costing disclosed to your finance office in full
  • Bonded client money, held separately until departure
Start a conversation

In the price

  • All accommodation, twin or double
  • Breakfast daily, and most lunches and dinners
  • Ground transport throughout
  • All site entries and permits
  • The journey leader, throughout
  • Local guides at each base
  • Workshop and host fees
  • Reading list and briefing paper
  • Airport transfers on the published days

Not in the price

  • Flights, and anything to get you to the start
  • Travel insurance — required, not sold by us
  • Visas and entry fees where they apply
  • Single-room supplement, quoted per journey
  • Drinks beyond what is served at group meals
  • Anything you do on your free afternoons

Straight answers

The questions we would ask, in your position.

Has a Rihlaya journey actually run?

No. Not one. We are contracting the first season now and expect first departures in spring 2027. Everything on this page that looks like a number is either a design decision we have made or a costing model we have built — never a result we have achieved.

Then why should we believe the 76%?

You should treat it as a commitment rather than a claim. It is what our model produces, published in advance so it can be held against us. Once journeys run, the figure we publish will be the actual one, per journey, and it will move.

What will you measure, and publish?

Three things: how many journeys have actually run, what share of each price stayed in the region, and how many travellers came back for a second one. We would rather commit to those now, while they are all zero, than pick flattering ones later.

How fixed is the itinerary?

The bases and the nights are fixed — that is the product. Within a day, a good leader changes the plan constantly: a market that only happens on Thursdays, a conservator who is free at four, forty degrees at noon. Expect the shape to hold and the detail to move.

Is this physically hard?

Moderate. Medina streets are uneven, archaeological sites are unshaded, and some days involve four or five kilometres on foot in the heat. Each journey page will carry a plain description of the walking, and the Tunisia route is deliberately the gentlest of the six.

What about safety and travel advice?

We will only run in regions where our own local partners are working normally, and we will publish the relevant government advisory alongside each departure rather than leaving you to find it. If an advisory changes, we say so and offer your money back — before you ask.

Can we bring children?

On private and family departures, gladly, and we will rebuild the pace around them. On shared departures we would want to talk first — twelve strangers and an eleven-day seminar is not automatically a good week for a nine-year-old.

Who is behind this?

A small team, working on the first season out of a very small office. We are not going to dress that up with a leadership page and stock portraits. When there are people to introduce and journeys they have run, you will meet them here.

Before the first season opens

Tell us which of the six you would go on.

There is nothing to buy yet. Registering interest puts you on the list that hears first when a journey is confirmed — leader named, houses contracted, costing published — and it tells us which routes to contract first. Eight to twelve seats do not go far.

Register interest Read the costing again

Or write to hello@rihlaya.com. A person reads it.

An open arched doorway with light falling across a tiled threshold