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| Home - City Guide - Dubai - City Overview | ||
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City Overview Dubai Until 1967 Dubai was a small British territory resting lazily on the shores of the Arabian Gulf. Much of the population was still spread out across the wild expanse of the deserts with Bedouin tribes eking out a living as they had for thousands of years. Then came the discovery of oil, which turned the local rulers into multi-billionaires overnight and resulted in a seismic shift in Dubai society. The ruling sheikhs divorced themselves from Britain in 1971, and spent their new-found wealth wisely, investing it in infrastructure and in building an impressive new city centre. In just over three decades, Dubai has been transformed into an ultra-modern city of gleaming skyscrapers, air-conditioned malls and luxury hotels. Dubai is the second largest of the seven Emirates that make up the remarkably stable conglomeration that is the United Arab Emirates. During its breakneck development Dubai has managed to avoid taking on the less salubrious features of many modern cities, with an affluent population, few traffic jams, zero unemployment and minimal crime rate. Dubai today is a confident city, a city where people work hard, live well and want to enjoy life, as evidenced by the countless leisure opportunities on offer and the proliferation of golf courses in an arid desert climate. Traces of the old way of life still filter through, however, with spice-filled old souks, ancient trading dhows that look like they have just sailed their way out of the pages of a Joseph Conrad novel still ploughing Dubai Creek, and attempts to preserve the Bedouin past, such as the Dubai Museum and the Heritage Village. In Dubai today, it is possible to sit astride a camel, have henna tattoos drawn by a Bedouin tribeswoman, while a Jumbo Jet screams overhead. The past, present and future merge in Dubai - a country where the government can announce the building of the world's tallest hotel, the Arab Tower, while some of its colleagues are dressed up in traditional garb entertaining tourists at a heritage village and others still are gearing up to compete in a gruelling cross-desert endurance horserace. Unlike some of the other Gulf states, Dubai is also a tolerant society, as much due to the easygoing Emirate locals as the reality of having a majority population of temporary immigrants from all over the world who come to Dubai on short-term contracts. They come from all over the world, everyone from oil executives from Dallas to internet designers from London and domestic servants from the Philippines, to make as much money in two years as they would struggle to make at home in ten. Accompanying this economic immigration in recent years has been a new influx, this time the ever increasing number of tourists who are discovering that Dubai may be a city built on oil, but that it also offers endless leisure activities, a taste of local culture and some of the finest hotels in the world, as well as, of course, endless sunshine. |
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