Durrat Al Bahrain

Durrat Al Bahrain sits at the southern tip of the island, a cluster of artificial atolls and fish-shaped peninsulas dredged out of the Gulf starting in the mid-2000s, and driving down the causeway toward it feels like entering a development that hasn’t quite decided what it wants to be yet. Some sections are genuinely finished and functioning — a golf course, a water park, a scattering of villas and one sizable resort where I ended up spending a night — while other stretches are still bare sand crescents, roads laid out to nowhere, waiting for towers that may or may not ever get built.

I’ll admit the incomplete parts were more interesting to me than the finished ones. I rented a bicycle from the resort and rode out along one of the empty peninsulas at sunset, past unfinished infrastructure and empty plots, with absolutely nobody else around and the turquoise shallows of the Gulf on both sides. It had a strange, almost post-apocalyptic calm to it — ambition frozen mid-construction, but genuinely beautiful in the particular light of a Gulf evening.

The finished resort side delivers exactly what it promises — a genuinely nice stretch of private beach, calm shallow water good for swimming, a handful of restaurants overlooking the marina where yachts from Manama’s wealthier set come to dock for the weekend. I had a good, unremarkable dinner of grilled fish there and watched a family of Bahraini kids do cannonballs off the jetty until well after dark, which is a perfectly fine way to spend an evening even if the surrounding development is still half a decade away from finished.

When to go: Winter weekends bring out Bahraini families for the beach and water park; weekdays are close to empty, which suits the slightly surreal, half-built parts of the development better. It’s about forty minutes from Manama by car.