The Arabian Gulf’s most ancient, most historically layered, and most genuinely extraordinary island kingdom — where the capital city of Manama’s extraordinary fusion of gleaming financial district towers and ancient pearl diving heritage creates one of the Gulf region’s most fascinatingly complex and most compellingly contrasted urban travel experiences, the UNESCO-listed Qal’at al-Bahrain fortress’s extraordinary 5,000-year archaeological narrative spanning Dilmun, Kassite, Greek, and Portuguese civilisations represents one of the most extraordinary and most historically significant multi-period heritage sites in the entire Arabian world, and the legendary Tree of Life — a 400-year-old mesquite tree surviving in magnificent solitude in the middle of the Bahraini desert without any visible source of water — has captivated the imagination of scientists, travellers, and storytellers from every corner of the earth as one of nature’s most extraordinary, most mysterious, and most genuinely awe-inspiring living phenomena.