Theme Week Saudi Arabia – Ta’if

27 April 2017 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  8 minutes

Historic Shubra Palace © Mmasudtu/cc-by-sa-4.0

Historic Shubra Palace © Mmasudtu/cc-by-sa-4.0

Ta’if is a city in Mecca Province of Saudi Arabia at an elevation of 1,879 m (6,165 ft) on the slopes of Sarawat Mountains (Al-Sarawat Mountains). It has a population of 1,200,000 people and is the unofficial summer capital. The city is the center of an agricultural area known for its grapes, pomegranate, figs, roses and honey. Ta’if was still little more than a medieval city when the Saudis took control of it. However, they later embarked on a project of modernizing the city. Saudi Arabia’s first public power generator was set up in Ta’if in the late 1940s. In terms of building roads to the isolated city, in 1965 the then King Faisal inaugurated the 54 mi (87 km) mountain highway between Mecca and Ta’if, and in 1974 the 400 mile Ta’if-AbhaJizan highway was started. By the 1991 Gulf War, Ta’if was such a modern city in terms of communications that it was chosen as the site of the Rendon Group‘s television and radio network, which used to feed the news to Kuwait during the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq.   read more…

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