Coverage / Bahrain
Bahrain
Western Asia
An island kingdom in the Arabian Gulf, linked to Saudi Arabia by the King Fahd Causeway, and one of the oldest trading centres in the region. Bahrain layers the Bronze Age Dilmun burial mounds and the Qal'at al-Bahrain fort over a pearling past inscribed by UNESCO in Muharraq, the low-rise capital of Manama, the Sakhir desert circuit that brought Formula 1 to the Middle East in 2004, and warm Gulf reefs that now hold a sunken Boeing 747.
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What you can do in Bahrain
Museums & Galleries
- Manamayear-roundThe Bahrain National Museum is the best single introduction to a country that has been inhabited and traded through for six thousand years. Opened in 1988 on the Manama corniche, it is the oldest and largest public museum in Bahrain, and its halls carry you from the Bronze Age civilisation of Dilmun, when the island was a pivot of Gulf trade, through the Tylos and Islamic periods to the customs, crafts and documents of recent centuries. The Hall of Graves displays finds from the vast burial-mound fields that still dot the island, and there are strong sections on pearling and on the marine life of the Gulf, plus an art gallery of Bahraini and international work. It gives context to everything else on the island, from the Qal'at al-Bahrain fort to the Muharraq pearling houses, and an hour or two here reframes the whole visit.
- MuharraqJan Feb Mar Apr Nov DecThe Pearling Path is an open-air museum threaded through the old town of Muharraq, and the most complete surviving record anywhere of the pre-oil pearling economy. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2012 as Pearling, Testimony of an Island Economy, it links seventeen restored buildings along a walking route of about three and a half kilometres, from the courtyard houses of pearl merchants and the lodgings of divers and captains to oyster-storage warehouses and a stretch of the old seafront, ending at the Bu Maher fortress from which the boats once sailed. Anchor houses such as Bin Matar House and the Siyadi complex are furnished and interpreted, and a modern visitor centre ties the fragments together. Walking it, you understand how an entire society was built around the summer dive for pearls, and how it shaped the architecture, trade and social order of the island before oil changed everything.
Best months at a glance
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