Al Safa Park

This guide to Al Safa Park opens with a question about age in a city built almost entirely since 1970, then traces the park from its 1975 opening on Dubai's sand-dune outskirts through fifty years of the city growing up around it, until the Dubai Water Canal cut through its northeastern corner in 2014. It moves through the nearly seventeen thousand trees, three lakes and two hundred bird species that remain, and a mini train that still circles the grounds on weekends.