Kuwait City

The bay that gives Kuwait City its shelter drew Arab clans from central Arabia in the early eighteenth century, and the name comes from a word for a small fort. The Al Sabah family were chosen to lead the settlement around 1752, and the town grew rich on pearl diving, shipbuilding and the long-distance dhow trade that carried goods between India, East Africa and the head of the Gulf. A mud wall with gates enclosed it, and the last of these walls, built in 1920, is remembered in the line of the modern ring road and in surviving gates along it.

Two shocks remade the town in the twentieth century. The pearl trade collapsed in the 1930s as Japanese cultured pearls took the market, and then oil, found in commercial quantity before the Second World War and exported from 1946, brought in money on a scale nothing had prepared it for. From the 1950s the old town was almost entirely demolished and rebuilt to a master plan of ring roads and zoned districts, with the population moved out to new suburbs; the Kuwait Towers of 1979 and the Seif Palace clock tower became the symbols of the new city.

On 2 August 1990 Iraqi forces invaded and occupied the city for seven months, damaging public buildings and museums and driving much of the population into exile before a US-led coalition liberated the country in February 1991. Reconstruction was swift, and the city has since spread further inland and along the coast, adding the Al Hamra Tower, Al Shaheed Park and a long-planned new business district on reclaimed land. Since February 2026 it has been under a campaign of aerial attack in the wider Iran war.

The defining institution of social life is the diwaniya, a reception room attached to the house where men gather on set evenings to drink tea, argue about politics and do business. Kuwait's political culture — the most argumentative in the Gulf, with an elected parliament that has repeatedly clashed with the ruling family, and suspended since 2024 — is rooted in these rooms as much as in the assembly chamber.

The city is also a media and publishing centre whose theatre and television comedies and dramas are watched across the Arabian Peninsula, and it keeps a strong maritime memory: the pearling songs and work chants of the diving crews, the model dhows in the museums, and the preserved wooden ships on the waterfront. Sadu weaving, with its red and black geometric bands, connects the city to the Bedouin interior, and is taught and sold at Sadu House.

About two-thirds of Kuwait's residents are foreign workers, chiefly from India, Egypt, other Arab countries, Bangladesh and the Philippines, and the streets, shops and restaurants of the city reflect that mix far more than the citizen population alone. Manners are formal and hospitable: coffee and dates are offered at once, invitations are pressed, and refusal is softened rather than direct. Public life is segregated in more traditional settings, and Ramadan reorders the day for everyone.

Almost the whole country lives in the metropolitan area, about three million people in the metropolitan area, of whom only a minority are Kuwaiti citizens. Very few now live in the old centre, which empties at night: families are spread through inland residential districts of walled villas served by co-operative supermarkets, while much of the expatriate workforce lives in apartment blocks in Salmiya, Hawalli, Farwaniya and Jleeb, or in labour accommodation near the industrial zones.

Oil underpins everything. Most citizens work for the state, which employs them on generous terms, and the private service economy — retail, restaurants, construction, domestic work — is staffed overwhelmingly by migrants. The Kuwait Investment Authority, founded in 1953 and the world's oldest sovereign wealth fund, manages the surplus. Diversification has been slow, and political deadlock has stalled large projects for years.

The day is built around the heat. In summer people move between air-conditioned car, office and mall, and life happens between sunset and the small hours; in the mild winter the corniche, the parks and the desert camps fill up, and camping out in the sand for weeks is a national pastime. Since February 2026 the aerial attacks have damaged refineries, desalination plants and government buildings, straining the city's power and water supply.

Kuwaiti home cooking is Gulf Arab with strong Persian, Iraqi and Indian influences, and its centrepiece is machboos: long-grain rice cooked with baharat spice, saffron and dried lime (loomi), served with fish, lamb or chicken and a sharp tomato sauce called daqoos. Fish from the Gulf matters enormously — hamour, the local grouper, and the prized silver zubaidi, or pomfret — and appears in murabyan, a shrimp and rice dish, and mutabbaq samak, fried fish turned out over rice with caramelised onions.

Everyday eating is cheaper and more mixed. Cafeterias run by Indian, Egyptian and Lebanese families sell shawarma, falafel, samosas and the sandwich-like chapati rolls that workers eat at all hours. Breakfast is balaleet, sweet vermicelli under a thin omelette, or nikhi, boiled chickpeas eaten from a paper cup. Harees, a smooth wheat and meat porridge, and thareed belong to Ramadan, when the souq fills after sunset and stalls sell sweets by the kilo.

There is no alcohol in Kuwait, and the drinking culture is built on tea and coffee: karak, strong tea boiled with milk, cardamom and sugar, sold from kiosks day and night, and gahwa, pale cardamom-scented Arabic coffee poured from a dallah into tiny cups and taken with dates. Fresh juice and laban, salted buttermilk, are the other staples, and gers ogaily, a saffron and cardamom sponge, is the cake brought out for visitors.