Oil Museum

You really must make the effort to visit this interesting little museum. It’s a long way out of town, in the midst of the Bahrain Oil fields at the foot of Jebel Dukhan (also known as the Mountain of Smoke, because of the mist in which it is sometimes shrouded). If you’ve never seen an oil field, with rust-coloured pipelines of every diameter zigzagging across the desert, the trip is interesting. The whole area smells of crude oil, or as one writer put it, the smell of money.

Inside there is a fascinating collection of objects related to oil exploration and a wonderful photographic history of the early development of the oil industry in Bahrain. There is a working model of an oil rig and several display cabinets of geological samples. One of the most interesting exhibits is a home-made, gas-powered fan, with beaten copper blades. It must have been awfully hot living in a tent in the middle of the desert back in the early 30s!

Bahrain has relative not so much oil, in comparison to Saudi Arabia. But the Kingdom has a speciality in the refineries.