Overview
The sand was sprayed into position by a technique called rainbowing and settled by vibrocompaction; the crescent breakwater is rock, placed by GPS to within a few centimetres. The island added 78 kilometres of coastline to Dubai. Its environmental record is the other half of the story: the dredging buried reefs and changed currents along the coast, and the fronds’ enclosed water needed engineering afterwards to circulate at all.
Highlights
The monorail runs the trunk to Atlantis and is the cheapest way to see the scale; the view from The View at the Palm observatory on floor 52 is the only way to see the shape from the island itself. The boardwalk along the eastern crescent is free, public and mostly empty. Beaches on the fronds are private; the public beach is at the trunk end.