Dubai has never been shy about its relationship with gold, but even by local standards this is literal: the Dubai Gold District is preparing to open the world’s first 24-carat gold walkway — a golden path through the heart of the district, billed as the longest of its kind anywhere, expected to welcome its first footsteps within the next two months and before the year is out. Rashid Al Harmoodi, the district’s senior commercial director, frames it as a new landmark for a quarter that increasingly behaves like one: wholesale gold trading offices there are up twenty per cent since January, new shops dealing in gold, jewellery, gemstones and fine watches up fifteen, and a purpose-built venue is planned to host the Middle East’s largest gold and jewellery trading exhibition.
The walkway announcement arrived in good company. The district has just witnessed the unveiling of Mayura Sahasra, a pair of 22-carat gold jhumka earrings from Joyalukkas weighing 16.514 kilograms — enough to claim two Guinness World Records at once, for the heaviest and the largest pair of gold earrings ever made. They are not for sale; they will live on permanent display in Dubai, which seems fitting for objects no earlobe could survive.
Both follow the opening days earlier of Jewel of Joy, Joyalukkas’s 25,000-square-foot flagship in the district — the largest jewellery showroom in the Middle East, inaugurated by UAE Minister of Foreign Trade Dr Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, complete with a Royal Bangle Walk visitors stroll through. Showroom, record, and now a road of gold underfoot: the Gold District is assembling itself into a destination rather than a marketplace, and Dubai’s claim to the title of the world’s City of Gold has rarely looked so well paved.
