The “tourist landmarks” page on Kuwait’s portal gives neither hours nor prices, but it gives something no other page does: areas and dates as figures. Set those figures side by side and something odd appears.
Figure against figure
The page describes Al Shaheed Park as “the largest urban park in Kuwait”, at two hundred thousand square metres.
On the same page it describes Boulevard Park in Salmiya as a tourism and leisure development running to three hundred and fifty-three thousand square metres.
So the Salmiya development is roughly a hundred and fifty-three thousand metres wider. The difference is that the first is a park and the second is a complex: a shopping centre, international shops, a hypermarket, an indoor entertainment hall, gardens, a restaurant village, a health club, an outdoor theatre and a multi-purpose hall.
Two dates
- Green Island: opened in February 1988 as part of the waterfront, and the page says it is entirely artificial.
- Messilah Water Village: founded in late 1992 on twenty thousand square metres, on the coastal road in Mubarak Al Kabeer governorate.
One distance
The page gives Failaka a figure rarely stated: twenty kilometres from the shores of Kuwait City, in the north-western corner of the Arabian Gulf.
Named without detail
Four clubs are named and no more: Al Shaab, the Yacht Club, Ras Al Ard and Fahaheel. Two parks likewise: the Fountain Park and the Tourist Park. And three beaches: Messilah, Egaila and the waterfronts.
For Kuwait Zoo, only the location is given: the Omariya area on the airport road.
How to read the page
It is an index rather than a visiting guide. It is good for knowing what exists, how big it is and when it started, and no good for planning a weekend without a phone call or a visit to each place’s own site.
Photo: a seaside promenade among palm trees at sunset. By PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: Kuwait’s e-government portal, the “tourist landmarks in Kuwait” page in the visitors section.
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