King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima have ended their short trip to the United Arab Emirates on a high note. Together with the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation Tom de Bruijn, Their Majesties have opened the Dutch pavilion at the Dubai 2020 Expo.
The Dutch King and Queen travelled to Dubai to officially inaugurate the pavilion on Wednesday, 3 November, coinciding with the fair’s day of the Netherlands.
Expo is a global fair hosted every five years in a different city. Each country participating is assigned a pavilion or area to showcase their excellence in the theme they have selected for the year.
The 2020 fair was supposed to happen last year but was postponed due to health safety concerns, as well as travel restrictions that would have prevented many countries from participating.
The fair is being hosted in Dubai, a city that has experienced a tourism boom over the last decade, despite the UAE’s complicated diplomatic relationship with many countries around the world.
The theme selected by the 2020 Expo committee was “Connecting minds, creating the future,” highlighting how the world can come together to solve global challenges, the biggest of which is obviously climate change, which is why the Netherlands has chosen to centre its pavilion around the theme of sustainability.
King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima centred their visit around the Pure Harvest stand, where they tasted some of their honey, before being given a tour of their innovative plantations and attending a meeting with Pure Harvest representatives.
The plantations, in particular, have attracted the royals’ attention, as they use technological innovation to grow fresh produce with as little water as possible, making their products suitable for cultivation in the desert, something that is undoubtedly vastly appealing to the UAE citizens.
King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima have already returned to the Netherlands, with both of them resuming their agendas on Friday.
