It’s very common for people to write their names on the beach; I’m sure you must have done that at some point in your life. While most people use sticks or their own feet to draw letters on the sand, one crazy Arab sheikh used excavators to write his name on his own island near Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. A series of canals were carved into the mostly uninhabited island to spell out the first name of Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family. What resulted was something so big that the doodle on the beach was clearly visible from space.
Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan is an eccentric man who has spent a lifetime and a big portion of his immense wealth on building gigantic manmade creations. In addition to amassing hundreds of rare and quirky automobiles, the Emirati royal’s obsession with supersizing cars has earned him many world records, including the world’s biggest SUV, biggest truck, biggest Jeep, and many more. However, etching his name on the Al Futaisi island was quite possibly the most audacious project undertaken by the 74-year-old. The winding canals carved to spell the word ‘HAMAD’ covered an area about a mile in height and a staggering two miles long from the ‘H’ to the ‘D’.
According to archival satellite imagery, the work on this project began in 2005. While carving out the first two letters only took a few months, the progress slowed down considerably, with the final “D” started taking shape only by 2008. To fulfill his dream project, Sheikh Hamad had his workmen labor relentlessly to carve the series of canals in perfect shape and size. Finally, by 2010, the digging of the canals was completed, which was later flooded with seawater. It is unknown how much Sheikh Hamad spent on the mega-project, but we can only believe it to be a multi-million-dollar undertaking, which took more than half a decade to complete. Then, all of a sudden, the beach doodle completely disappeared even before it had been completed.
No one knows the exact reason why the Arab sheikh decided to destroy the enormous piece of beach graffiti he had spent years and millions of dollars building. However, it is believed that a 2011 article on the project that appeared in the UK-based newspaper The Sun attracted undesirable publicity, which earned the ire of other important members of the royal family. “It was stopped midway through, and the rumor was one relative in the royal family told him to stop,” WSJ reported, quoting one person who worked on Futeisi Island. “It was the sheikh’s pet project, but it doesn’t fit into Abu Dhabi 2030.” The island, which Sheikh Hamad inherited from his father, still remains uninhabited, with an abandoned large house and a helipad on its eastern shore. While the series of canals were filled with sand to erase the name, a small portion of the letter H still remains, which can be seen in satellite images.
Who is Sheikh Hamad?
Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan al Nahyan, aka Sheikh Hamad, is an Emirate royal. His family has ruled Abu Dhabi for over three centuries and controls over 95 percent of the UAE’s oil deposits. In the 1990s, the sheikh famously asked Mercedes to build him an entire fleet of S-classes finished in every color of the rainbow, earning him the nickname ‘Rainbow Sheikh’. Obsessed with quirky and rare automobiles, his massive car collection is split across four museums located in the UAE and Morocco. According to some reports, his personal net worth is over $20 billion.
