The 1920 wall: four metres of mud around Kuwait City, and five gates that outlived it
Raised after the Battle of Hamdh and torn down by cabinet decision in February 1957, it left behind a line of gardens.
Until the mid-1950s, Kuwait City stopped at a wall. It was the third in the town’s history, built in 1920 under Sheikh Salem Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah, the ninth ruler, after the Battle of Hamdh, to protect the town.
Shore to shore
The wall ran in an arc around the landward side of the town, from the Al-Wataya shore in the Qibla district to the Bneid Al-Gar shore in the east. The Ministry of Information puts its length at about five miles; Al-Anba gives seven kilometres. It stood about four metres high and three metres thick.
It was built from what the town had to hand: mud, sun-dried brick and gypsum.
The darwazas
Traffic in and out of the town passed through gates known as darwazas. The wall was built with four, and a fifth was added later; the Al-Shaab and Al-Jahra gates are among them.
Two walls before it
It was not the first. A mud wall went up around the town under Sheikh Abdullah bin Sabah Al-Sabah in 1760, and a second in 1814. All three were built for defence.
4 February 1957
As the city spread beyond its old limits, the Council of Ministers under Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salem Al-Sabah ordered the wall demolished on 4 February 1957, keeping its five gates as heritage. What replaced it is known today as the Wall Gardens.
Photo: A mud wall and tower at the Red Palace in Jahra, illustrative, not the city wall. Photograph by Zairon, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: Kuwait Ministry of Information, “On this day”, 14 June 2025; Al-Anba, “60 years since the removal of Kuwait’s third wall”, 4 February 2017.
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