Manama & Bahrain Fort

About this pack

A 5-day premium trip to Manama, Bahrain, taking in Bahrain Fort, Bahrain National Museum, Al Fateh Grand Mosque and Bab Al Bahrain.

Inside the Manama & Bahrain Fort trip

Manama & Bahrain Fort opens at Qal'at al-Bahrain, also called Bahrain Fort or the Portuguese Fort, an archaeological site on the northern shore of Bahrain Island about 6 kilometres from Manama. Excavations under way since 1954 have uncovered an artificial mound, or tell, 12 metres high, made up of seven stratified layers of occupation running from around 2300 BC up to the 18th century AD and left behind by Kassites, Greeks, Persians and Portuguese in turn — making it the oldest fortification anywhere in the Persian Gulf. The site served as the capital of the Dilmun civilisation, described in the Epic of Gilgamesh as the "land of immortality," and the Portuguese fort that gives the tell its modern name — qal'a meaning simply "fort" — stands atop the mound as the visible marker of a site that was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage property in 2005.

Findings from Qal'at al-Bahrain and elsewhere on the island fill the Bahrain National Museum, the largest public museum in the country and the oldest national museum anywhere in the Gulf. Opened on 15 December 1988 by the Emir of Bahrain, Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa, the museum was designed by the Danish firm Krohn & Hartvig Rasmussen and built on an artificial peninsula looking across to the island of Muharraq, its collection spanning some 5,000 years of Bahraini history across halls devoted to the Dilmun civilisation, the island's more recent pre-industrial past, and its natural environment. The Hall of Dilmun Graves reassembles an actual burial mound transported from the site of A'ali, and the wider Dilmun Burial Mounds of Bahrain were themselves recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019, while the Hall of Tylos and Islam traces the island's Hellenistic contacts and its adoption of Islam in the 7th century AD through artefacts from the Khamis Mosque, Bahrain's oldest.

From the museum the route continues to the Al Fateh Grand Mosque, also known as the Al-Fateh Islamic Centre, built in 1987 by the late Sheikh Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa and named for Ahmed Al Fateh. Covering 6,500 square metres with room for more than 7,000 worshippers, it ranked among the largest mosques in the world at the time of its construction, its dome — a 54-tonne structure built entirely of fibreglass — long counted as the largest fibreglass dome anywhere; the interior combines Italian marble flooring, an Austrian chandelier and teak doors from India beneath Kufic calligraphy running throughout the building. Since 2006 the mosque has also housed the National Library of Bahrain, whose collection of roughly 7,000 volumes includes copies of the Hadith, the Global Arabic Encyclopedia and Al-Azhar journals more than a century old, and the mosque remains open to visitors on all days except Friday.

The trip closes at Bab Al Bahrain, the "Gateway of Bahrain," a landmark building on Customs Square in Manama's central business district that marks the main entrance to the Manama Souq. Opened in 1949 to a design by Charles Belgrave, the British adviser to the ruling emir, the building originally stood directly on the Manama coastline; extensive land reclamation across the second half of the 20th century has since left it several kilometres inland, and the square in front of it is considered the region's first formal public space. Refurbished in 1986 to incorporate Islamic architectural features and again in 2013, the building today consists of a large central arch spanning the road into the souq, flanked by two smaller pedestrian arches, and houses a tourist information office, a handicrafts shop and several cafés — a fitting last stop after a route that has already moved through four thousand years of Dilmun history, a national museum, and one of the Gulf's largest mosques.

• Qal'at al-Bahrain — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Bahrain National Museum — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Al Fateh Grand Mosque — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Bab Al Bahrain — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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