Kish Island

Kish was a trading island long before it was a resort. Under the name Qais it appears in medieval Arabic and Persian geographies as a port at the centre of the Gulf, whose merchants dealt in pearls fished from the banks nearby, in horses shipped to India and in goods moving between Basra, Oman and the Indian coast. From the eleventh century its rulers competed with, and eventually eclipsed, the older mainland port of Siraf, and for roughly two centuries the island was one of the wealthiest places in the Gulf. Marco Polo's account of the region mentions the island's pearls, and the ruins at Harireh, spread over about three square kilometres of the northern coast, date from those centuries.

The rise of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Gulf, took the trade away, and Kish sank into obscurity as a poor fishing and pearling island. Pearl diving remained its main livelihood into the twentieth century, until Japanese cultured pearls destroyed the market in the 1930s.

The modern island dates from the 1970s, when the government of the day developed it as an international resort with an airport, hotels and a road network. That project ended with the revolution of 1979, and the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s left the Gulf a dangerous place. Kish was designated a trade zone in 1989, which reopened it as a duty-free shopping and holiday destination for Iranians; hotels, malls and apartment blocks were built through the 1990s and 2000s, and the island's population and visitor numbers have grown steadily since.

Kish is Iran's holiday island, and its culture is largely the culture of Iranian tourism: families and young couples from Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz come for the sea, the malls and the mild winter, and the island trades on being a little more relaxed and better supplied than the mainland. Shopping is the main activity — electronics, clothing and cosmetics brought in duty free — and trade fairs and conferences fill the hotels outside the holiday peaks.

The permanent population is a different island. Alongside the workers who have come from all over Iran for jobs in hotels, construction and the free zone, there are long-settled families of the Gulf coast whose culture is Bandari: a southern Iranian mix with strong Arab and East African influence, heard in the drums, the neyanban bagpipe and the fast six-eight rhythms of Bandari music, and seen in the loose, bright clothing and, among some older women, the stiff burqa-style face covering worn along this coast. Many coastal families are Sunni Muslims, unlike most of Iran.

National rules hold here as everywhere in the country: headscarves and covered arms and legs in public, separate enclosed beaches for women and men, and no alcohol. Sea customs shape the calendar too — fishing, boat building and, in memory if no longer in practice, the pearl diving that once sent crews out for weeks at a time and left behind its own songs.

Roughly 55,000 people live on the island, a number that swells with holidaymakers in the cool season and with short-term workers. Almost everyone depends on the free-trade zone in some way: hotels, restaurants and beach concessions, the shopping centres, construction, the airport and port, and the administration that runs the zone. There is little farming on the thin coral soil, though gardens and greenhouses supply some vegetables, and fishing continues from small harbours.

Life is organised around the heat. From late spring the working day starts early and the afternoons are spent indoors, with the malls acting as air-conditioned public space; evenings bring people out to the seafront, the parks and the food courts, and summer nights are lived late. Fresh water is the island's permanent constraint, supplied by desalination, and electricity for cooling is the largest running cost of almost every building.

The island is comfortable by Iranian standards but not detached from the country's problems: inflation and the collapse of the currency have pushed up the cost of imported goods and of the flights that bring visitors, and the fortunes of the hotels follow the national economy closely. Residents live mainly in the city of Kish in the north of the island and in apartment blocks built for zone employees, well away from the resort strips, and many keep families on the mainland.

Kish eats what the Gulf coast eats. The staples are fish and shrimp: whole fish rubbed with turmeric, garlic and lime and grilled or fried, shrimp cooked with rice and spices, and ghalyeh mahi, a dark, sour stew of fish with tamarind, fresh coriander, garlic and chilli that is the signature dish of southern Iran. Ghalyeh meygu is the same sauce made with shrimp. The southern spice palette — hot, sour and much heavier on chilli and tamarind than the food of the plateau — is the clearest difference between this coast and the rest of the country.

Bread is the flat, thin local kind baked in a clay oven, and rice is eaten with almost everything, often coloured with turmeric or mixed with dill and broad beans. Falafel and small stuffed pastries, brought from across the Gulf, are common street food along this coast, as is a hot spiced sandwich sold from counters in the evening. Dates from the mainland groves, dried limes, tamarind and salted fish fill the shops, and fresh mango and other imported fruit are easy to find because of the island's trading status.

Drinks follow the national pattern: strong dark tea all day, doogh, which is salted yoghurt thinned with water, and fruit juices and sharbats scented with rose or lime. Alcohol is illegal throughout Iran. The one local indulgence is ice cream and faloodeh, eaten late in the evening when families walk on the seafront.