Al Bastakiya, Dubai

If you would like to get in touch with the past and see how Dubai was before the skyscrapers dominated the Emirate, go to Al Bastakiya along Dubai Creek.

This is an historic district and the oldest residential area in Dubai. It was built in the eighteen nineties with 60 houses, narrow lanes and marvelous wind towers. The unique thing about the area is that the people living there judged the wealth of their neighbors by the number of wind towers they possessed. It was once a residential area for rich merchants until the discovery of oil. The rich merchants moved away and the houses were taken over by expatriate workers.

In the nineteen seventies, half of the buildings were demolished to make room for an office complex and the rest became dilapidated, except for the Majlis Arts and Crafts Centre. The wind towers were used as warehouses. In 1989 the rest of the buildings were going to be demolished, but the timely intervention of Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, saved them.

He asked for them to be preserved, pointing out that they would be a powerful tourist attraction. Restoration work was carried out by the Dubai Municipality, ending in 2005. Nowadays the buildings house art galleries of local and Persian art and cafés.

Shaikh Muhammad Center for Cultural Understanding, a non-profit organization is located in Al Bastakiya. The purpose of creating this organization was to establish a relationship of culture between the people of Dubai.