WRDC supports Liwa Date Festival

The council aims to promote the Liwa festival and use this to raise awareness of the region and more importantly; as an opportunity to meet and interact with the local residents.

Mohamed Hamad Bin Azzan Al Mazrouei, Director General, WRDC said:

"We are pleased to support and sponsor a festival that wonderfully showcases our national culture and heritage. To show our dedication to the progress and development of Al Gharbia, we have pledged our support and are working to promote such initiatives that preserve and protect our region's culture and tradition. We have a stand at the festival so that we can interact with residents and visitors that want to learn more about dates and Al Gharbia. My dedicated team is also on hand to discuss and highlight our initiatives for the region."

The annual event, in its fourth year, is a 17 day long festival that is a very traditional gathering and aims at facilitating the business of dates. The festival has a lot to offer including; a host of traditional activities, one of which was a mass wedding for approximately 340 couples sponsored by His Highness General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan held last Friday.

The festival has also attracted a large number of female entrepreneurs from Abu Dhabi city and Al Gharbia following the introduction of handicraft displays, which include traditional handicrafts, hand woven items, embroidered garments, hand bags and perfumes. One of the major highlights of the festival is the daily auction of date baskets that attracted many high bids; the most recent being the six kilos of Khalas dates for Dhs 40,000. The festival also highlighted the fact that there are around 120 types of dates planted in the UAE.

Lectures on the agriculture of palm trees along with special educational sessions for children, poetry evenings, and Islamic cultural celebrations will be held over the next week. Other attractions from the festival include; the display of the largest steel plate of dates in the world and the date competition, which begins on August 1, where the Khalifa International Date Palm Award committee will offer three Dh250,000 prizes for the first time in the history of the festival.

WRDC is an active promoter and supporter of community initiatives that raise awareness of the region and its traditions. They recently supported a forum held at the Umaimah bin Abdul Mutalib School on Dalma Island that focused on three key elements of local heritage; namely the history of Dalma Island, the role of heritage in enhancing patriotism and the presence of heritage in the educational curriculum.