Palm Jumeirah, Dubai’s iconic man-made islands, turn 20

(CNN) – From a vantage point more than 50 stories high, Ali Mansour gazes out at the islands he helped build nearly two decades ago. “It was a great challenge,” he says. «A once in a lifetime experience».Those islands make up Dubai’s iconic Palm Jumeirah, an artificial palm-shaped archipelago that is home to luxury hotels, pristine beaches and almost 80,000 people.

“It was a first time,” says Mansour, “an unprecedented project of this magnitude.”

A civil engineer by profession, Mansour moved from Canada to Dubai in 1998 to work in a consulting firm. He watched from a distance the start of the Palm project in June 2001. “I was very curious when the first satellite images were released in 2002, showing a tiny piece of land emerging above the ocean’s surface,” he says. “So I decided that I was going to do whatever it took to join the company behind the work on this project.”

A year later, Mansour joined Nakheel, Palm’s construction company. Today he is a consultant and project manager for Nakheel Marine Engineering.

The construction of the island

No steel or concrete was used to create the base of the island; instead, the team used only sand and rock. Although Dubai is surrounded by desert sand, they could not rely on the emirate’s abundant resource. “Desert sand liquefies in water,” explains Mansour.

Some had to be dredged 120 million cubic meters of sand and bring it from the bottom of the Persian Gulf, 10 nautical miles from the islands.

More than 7 million tonnes of rocks were mined from the Hajar Mountains of the northern UAE.

These rocks make up the 11-kilometer-long crescent-shaped breakwater that protects the island from big waves and strong winds. Nakheel claims that all the rock and sand used to build the island could form a six-foot-high wall that would circle the world three times.

The 560-hectare island is so large that Mansour and his team used satellite-guided technology to help build it in the shape of a palm leaf. Mansour, who is also an expert diver, visually inspected the breakwater with five of his colleagues, “diving together in parallel and at different levels,” he says. The review took Mansour and his team 10 weeks.

“Even though we had the latest software,” he says, “I’m an old-school person … visual inspection is still very essential to me.”

Reach new milestones

During the first 20 years of Palm’s existence, the only way visitors could see the entire colossal structure was from a helicopter tour or by jumping from a plane.

Now, visitors can view the Palm from Nakheel’s new, 52-story-tall 360-degree observation deck, called View at the Palm. The platform was inaugurated in April.

“We’ve added layer after layer of things to do on the Palm, so it’s not just a place to live, it’s also a great tourist destination,” says Gail Sangster, Nakheel’s chief asset officer.

View at the Palm, which is part of the new Palm towerScheduled for full opening later this year, it is the island’s latest attraction, joining others such as the Atlantis complex and Palm West Beach. Last year, Palm Jumeirah also received a Guinness world record by the largest fountain in the world. “The future of the Palm is going to keep moving forward and moving forward,” says Sangster.

Even Mansour, who has seen practically every inch of the island up close, can’t help but get the creeps when he sees the Palm from above.

“This 360-degree open view with all the landmarks on the mainland and the view of the island as a whole is really amazing,” he says.