I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t been to Baku, my wife’s hometown, for a few years. But last week I made the short two-hour flight across Iran and the Caspian to the capital of Azerbaijan, and what a transformation.
Maybe it was the huge investment made by the government to get the city ready at short notice to stage the Eurovision song contest in 2011; maybe it’s the steady stream of oil revenue flowing through the energy capital of western Asia. Whatever the reason, Baku, I can confirm, is well and truly booming.
Others in the UAE have also noticed this. This year the Dubai Chamber of Commerce led a delegation to the city, which its regards as the gateway to central Asia and eastern Europe and opened a representative office there, its first outside the UAE.
I wonder if the DCC party took in the spanking new five-lane highway from the Heydar Aliyev airport to downtown? Or the 65,000-seater stadium under construction for the inaugural European Games to be held in the city next year? Or the nearly-completed Trump Tower? Or the horizon-defining skyscraper that will be the new home of Socar, the Azerbaijan energy sovereign wealth fund?
I wonder if they clocked the squadrons of expensive cars – big SUVs, BMWs, Mercedes – still driving like maniacs on the wide downtown streets, where once the eternal Lada was all there was to be seen?
Did the DCC executives stop to shop at the grande luxe brand shops – Vuitton, Chanel, Prada – that seem to have taken over the retail spaces, where just a few years ago were tatty souvenir stalls and fast food outlets? Or meander around Fountain Square, transformed from a rundown wasteland into a delightful urban concourse?
The whole of “new” central Baku, the part that nestles beside the fascinating medieval Islamic fort called the Isheri Sheher, has undergone a dramatic makeover. Always full of architectural jewels, from the days when oil barons hot-footed it from Europe to exploit the city’s oil reserves and each built their own palatial home, the centre of the city is now a visual joy.
On a warm early summer evening, you could almost imagine yourself in Paris, with tree-lined boulevards and baroque frontages at every turn.
Another UAE organisation that has realised Baku’s potential is Jumeirah. While I was there, I paid a visit to one of the Dubai hotel chain’s newest projects, the Jumeirah Bilgah Beach hotel, ahead of its first official high season.
On the north side of the Absheron peninsula, about an hour’s drive from Baku through countryside “peppered with oil pumps and framed by pipelines” (in the lyrical turn of one Jumeirah executive), the Bilgah stands atop a limestone cliff overlooking the Caspian.
It’s doing a fair impersonation of the wave-like motif of the Jumeirah Beach Hotel in Dubai, on which its architect no doubt borrowed heavily for inspiration in design.
The best beaches were always on this side of the peninsula, but suffered from their proximity to the old Soviet petrochemicals plant at Sumgayit, a few kilometres to the west.
Sumgayit was once named the “most polluted place on Earth” by environmentalists, but the Azeris have cleaned up the mess admirably, at least around Bilgah. The area is now the summer playground for Baku’s growing number of wealthy entrepreneurs, with villas and hotels dotted along the horizon.
Take the lift down to the beach, slip off your shoes and have a paddle in the crisply cold Caspian while tiny crustaceans nibble away ticklishly in a natural pedicure. Magical.
fkane@thenational.ae
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