Bahrain Pearling Trail
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
The Bahrain pearling site consists of seventeen buildings in Muharraq City, three offshore oyster beds, part of the seashore and the Qal'at Bu Mahir fortress on the southern tip of Muharraq Island, from where boats set off for the oyster beds. The buildings include residences of wealthy pearl merchants, shops, storehouses and the Siyadi family mosque.
According to UNESCO, the pearl trade dominated the Gulf economy from the 2nd century to the 1930s. Its golden age ran from the 1850s to about 1930, and by the end of 1930 there were around 30,000 pearl divers. When Japan developed cultured pearls in the 1930s and oil was discovered in Bahrain in 1932, most divers moved to the new oil industry.
The site was inscribed on 30 June 2012, and its components are linked by a 3.5 km path. From 2013 the national culture authority restored the old quarter of Muharraq, and this revitalization received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2019.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).