A luxury hotel in Dubai is to create the first refrigerated beach so hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days.
"We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on," said Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace. "This is the kind of luxury that top people want."
The Palazzo Versace Hotel, Dubai, due to open late this year or early 2010, will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface. The swimming pool will be refrigerated and there are also proposals to install giant blowers to waft a gentle breeze over the beach, all to keep tourists cool in the searing heat of 40°C+ in summer.
The beach is to be part of the US$609 million, 12-story luxury hotel and residence complex, with 213 rooms, several with their own internal swimming pools, plus 169 apartments. Fifteen more such hotels are planned.
Competition to serve the world's rich is getting intense, especially in Dubai. The refrigerated beach is designed to give Versace the edge in this battle of luxury lifestyles.
But the hotel's plans have angered environmentalists. "Dubai is like a bubble world where the things that are worrying the rest of the world, like climate change, are simply ignored so that people can continue their destructive lifestyles," says Rachel Noble, the campaigns officer at Tourism Concern.
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