Best Things to Do in Kuwait City

1. Attend a Diwaniya

Kuwaitis are among the best conversationalists in the world, and the diwaniya is where that happens.

A diwaniya is both a room and the gathering held inside it. Families set aside a hall, often with its own entrance, where guests, neighbours, and passers-by come to sit, drink tea, eat dates, and talk. The doors stay open. There are so many across the country that government sources note you can find one or more on nearly every street.

What makes it more than a social custom is how much runs through it. Diwaniyas are the core of Kuwait's social, business, and political life, and the formal ones are described as the root of the country's consensual political system. National Assembly candidates campaign through them, giving voters direct access to the people who represent them. Business gets introduced and deals get opened across a diwaniya floor. Tradition holds that someone who comes to a decision maker's diwaniya must be heard out.

They come in types: family diwaniyas tied to a patriarch, political ones, religious ones, and trade-focused ones running from fishermen to foodies to doctors and diplomats. Women's diwaniyas have become part of the landscape too.

2. Take the Ferry to Failaka Island

Failaka sits around 20km off the coast and holds more than 4,000 years of history: a Bronze Age Dilmun settlement, a Greek colony from the Hellenistic period, and later Islamic habitation. The island's name is thought to come from ancient Greek.

It is also one of the strangest places in the Gulf. Before 1990 it was a popular Kuwaiti holiday island. During the Iraqi invasion the entire population was expelled to the mainland, the beaches were mined, and the buildings were used for target practice. Most of it was never resettled. You walk through a mostly abandoned town with shell damage still in the walls, then out to archaeological sites thousands of years older.

Pick the right ferry. This is the practical thing that decides whether the trip works. Two operators run the crossing from the Ras Salmiya terminal, and they are not equivalent.

The cheaper public ferry costs you most of the day in transit and leaves barely enough time to see anything. Pay the difference for Ikarus.

Image of Kuwait City Coastline At Sunset

3. Kuwait Towers at Sunset

The three towers on the Gulf shore are the symbol of the country, and the main tower carries a rotating observation deck and a restaurant above the city. Go for sunset, when the Gulf turns and the city lights come up underneath you while the deck slowly rotates.

The towers survived the 1990 invasion with damage and were restored after liberation, which gives the view a second layer if you've already been to the Martyrs Museum.

Image of Kuwait Towers

4. Tour the Grand Mosque

Kuwait's Grand Mosque (Al-Masjid Al-Kabir) is the country's largest and its official state mosque, and it's unusual in the region for its Andalusian architectural influence rather than the Ottoman or Persian styles you see elsewhere in the Gulf.

Non-Muslims are welcome on guided tours, and visitors consistently describe the welcome as one of the warmest parts of a Kuwait trip. Entry is free, and the tours run outside prayer times.

5. Al Shaheed Park (Phase 3 Has Opened)

Kuwait's largest urban park, built along the line of the old city wall, and it holds one of the largest over-structure green roofs in the world. It already contained memorial and museum zones alongside the green space.

As of the start of October it has a third phase, which is the biggest addition yet at 243,605 square metres and close to 191,000 square metres of that given to green space. Inside: an Olympic-size ice rink with spectator seating capable of hosting hockey and figure skating, a snow park with slides, zip lines, and an ice climbing wall, an outdoor cinema, a karting track, and a theatre seating over 2,300 with the largest stage in Kuwait.

There's also a small museum made from pieces of the old rink that stood on the site, including original seating and tile patterns. A thoughtful touch in a project that could have erased what came before.

6. Al-Qurain Martyrs Museum

The hardest and most important stop in the city. In the Al Qurain district, a house where 31 young men who had sworn a collective oath to defend their country held out against Iraqi forces during the occupation.

The building has been preserved in the state the battle left it. Shell holes, bullet damage, and structural destruction, untouched. Inside, exhibits cover the Battle of Al Qurain with artefacts, photographs, and personal belongings, and a memorial wall names the men who died.

The 1990-91 invasion is not distant history in Kuwait. It shapes how people talk about the country, and an hour here changes how you understand everything else you see, including why the Kuwait Towers were restored and why Failaka is still empty.

Image of Kuwait Flag 

7. The Avenues Mall

Putting a shopping mall on a list of cultural highlights needs defending, so here it is: in Kuwait, mall outings are a recognised social practice, studied alongside the diwaniya as one of the ways public life happens in a country where the climate makes outdoor gathering difficult for much of the year.

The Avenues is the largest mall in Kuwait and among the largest anywhere, with more than 1,100 stores across a dozen themed districts, built on a gross land area of around 360,000 square metres. It draws tens of millions of visits a year.

What makes it worth an hour rather than a dismissal is the design. The districts are built as distinct environments rather than identical corridors: The Souk is styled as a traditional covered market, Grand Avenue runs as a skylit street with a faux sky overhead, and the newer districts added in 2018 each have their own character. It's architecture as much as retail, and on a hot afternoon it's where the city is.