Coverage / Kuwait
Kuwait
Western Asia
A small, wealthy state at the head of the Arabian Gulf, built on a dhow-trading and pearling heritage that predates oil. Kuwait City fronts the water with the Kuwait Towers and the Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salem Cultural Centre, the largest museum complex in the world, while the Bronze Age and Hellenistic ruins of Failaka Island sit offshore in Kuwait Bay and the flat desert interior greens briefly after the spring rains.
3 activities · 4 pairings · 5 verified providers
What you can do in Kuwait
Museums & Galleries
- Failaka IslandJan Feb Mar Apr Nov DecFailaka is Kuwait's open-air history, an island in the bay that has been lived on almost continuously since the Bronze Age. It was a temple settlement of the Dilmun civilisation that traded across the Gulf, and then, in the third century BCE, a Greek garrison town under the successors of Alexander the Great, who named it Ikaros and left behind a fortress, a temple to Artemis and inscribed stones now studied as some of the easternmost Hellenistic remains. Emptied of its population in the 1990 invasion, the island wears that recent history too, its old town still marked by the conflict. Today a restored heritage village recreates pre-oil Kuwaiti life and the excavated tells and Ikaros sites are open to walk, a rare layering of Bronze Age, Greek and modern Kuwaiti stories on one small island a short ferry ride from the capital.
- Kuwait Cityyear-roundThe Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salem Cultural Centre is museum-going on a scale found almost nowhere else. Inaugurated in 2018 on an eighteen-hectare site on the Kuwait City waterfront, it is one of the largest museum complexes in the world, delivered in a single project and named for the ruler who founded modern Kuwait. Under its roofs sit six distinct museums: Natural History, Science, Space, and the Arabic-Islamic Science museum that traces the achievements of scholars across the medieval Islamic world, alongside a Fine Arts centre and a vast public realm with a planetarium and theatres. The displays are immersive and hands-on, built for families and for serious visitors alike, and a full day barely covers them. For the older story, the nearby Kuwait National Museum and the private Tareq Rajab collections of Islamic art and calligraphy fill in the country's deeper history and craft.
Best months at a glance
| J | F | M | A | M | J | J | A | S | O | N | D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Museums | ||||||||||||
| Sailing | ||||||||||||
| Scuba Diving |