Porto Arabia

This guide to Porto Arabia in Doha begins with dredging crews in the early 2000s pumping fifteen million cubic metres of sand, gravel and rock up from the Gulf seabed to build four hundred hectares of land where open water once stood. It follows the two heavy dredgers that did the digging, the wick drains and sand mounds engineers used to firm up soft silty mud, and the roughly two million cubic metres of rock laid by hand to hold back the sea. Stand on La Croisette, the promenade beneath you, and you're walking on ground that was once engineered flat by people whose names never made it onto any building.