Cultural and heritage events will be the focus of the date palm festival to be held in Abu Dhabi next month.

The sixth edition of The Emirates International Date Palm Festival will be held at Abu Dhabi National Conventional Centre from November 21 to 26.

It will have a number of new social, cultural, heritage and artistic events, and is being co-located with the SIAL Middle East. It is organised by Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority (ADFCA) in association with the Date Palm Friends Society.

The festival will feature six new programmes this year, including a ‘Local Cultural Oasis' designed in the shape of the UAE map, in which a wide variety of date palms would be showcased. Another specialty will be a 'Scientific Maze,' built in the form of a date palm, on whose inner walls will be placed educational pictures to guide the visitors to the maximum historical information and knowledge about dates and date palms.

Other attractions include the "Tests Corner," which will comprise a number of questions on dates displayed on a giant screen and visitors can answer them and win fabulous prizes; and "The Visitors' Wall,' will feature two huge boards on which the visitors can leave short hand-written messages, to be preserved as a souvenir of the event.

Mohamed Jalal Al Rayssi, the chairman of the organising committee, said the diverse events were designed in keeping with the interests of the various segments and age groups of the visitors to the event.

"The Festival will include a museum with all the interesting facts about the dates and the date palm, farming and harvesting and the various methods of manufacturing dates derivatives, exposing the visitors to a humungous amount of information about the blessed tree," he said.

"Our endeavour was to line up a comprehensive and complete set of attractive events so that the festival turns into a important platform to build partnership between the exhibitors and the international trade firms, as well as to strengthen the bonds between local emirati and global companies," Al Rayssi added.

The festival also comprises the National Theatre and the Traditional Heritage Kitchen,  where a variety of heritage events, folklore skits, children's plays, display of traditional clothes, sand art and the showcasing of examples of the recycling of various parts of the date palm would be held. The traditional kitchen will see various dates' delicacies being made by well known chefs from around the Arab world. - TradeArabia News Service