This post is an example of the invaluable information and data provided by the groundbreaking people at mapBH. For those unaware, mapBH is an incredible digital map archive of Bahrain throughout the past three centuries. It showcases Bahrain's ever-changing landscape, its cartography, its rural start and how urbanisation changed the islands as we know it. The hard work that has gone through with matching these maps with their geodata in such an easily accessible format is incredible. I encourage you to please bookmark and go through these maps as they are part of Bahrain's heritage of what it was, is, and could later be.
As an example, this week I decided to look at how the island of Nabih Saleh looked like on various maps, and luckily we have newly uploaded satellite images from mapBH as well! For context, Nabih Saleh is a small island in Tubli Bay on the eastern coastline of Bahrain. It sits between the main Bahrain island and Sitra island, and is connected to the two by a causeway. Please see this very enlightening post about Nabih Saleh by Ali Aljamri for more about the island's history.
We start in the first half of the 20th century. What is remarkable is the consistent representation of Nabih Saleh as being a lush and green island with an abundance of trees. This can be seen dramatically on the next image from 1967 where we can really observe the plentiful trees.
Unfortunately the next satellite photo from 1968 does show some thinning out of the vegetation, implying a degree of deforestation of the
date palms on this island.
The next photo from 1976 shows even scantier vegetation since 1968. Also seen is the Sitra causeway on the right side of the image which connects the capital
Manama to Sitra (an adjacent island) alongside Nabih Saleh.
The last image from 2024 shows dramatically how much lush greenery has been lost from Nabih Saleh, especially when compared to the preceding images.
I genuinely hope to see the day Nabih Saleh is green again, but I imagine that will be a long way away.
If you made it all the way here, I strongly encourage you to head over to
mapBH and start browsing!
