Saudi Arabia to build world's biggest botanical gardens

Saudi Arabia is set to lay the foundation stone for the King Abdullah International Gardens (KAIG) in Riyadh this week, with plans for the facility set to include the world’s largest botanical gardens, it was reported. Minister of Municipal and Rural Affairs Prince Mansour Bin Miteb will perform the ceremony on Thursday at the site, which will be 2.5m square metres in size and will be one of the largest environment projects in the world. The plans include two separate elements: a covered section and an open area. The covered facility, which will be the largest of its kind in the world, will include two giant botanical gardens which will be five times bigger than the world’s largest geodesic domes at the Eden Project in the UK. The outdoor area will include an open museum for plants, seeds bank and rocky garden, while the plans will also include research institutes, retail and hospitality outlets and a theatre, it added. The project will focus on local plant life in the Arabian Peninsula and is designed to appeal to families and tourists. Construction is already underway, with the levelling of the site and fencing works already completed.

Death toll rises to 7 in Saudi Arabia floods

Flash floods sparked by torrential rain in largely desert Saudi Arabia have killed seven people over the past three days, the civil defense authority said on Wednesday.Five other people are still missing after parts of the capital Riyadh andthe northeastern city of Arar were inundated, authority spokesman Colonel Abdullah al-Harithi told theofficial SPA news agency.The storms that have accompanied the downpours have brought down power lines, sparking outages in parts of north Riyadh.Schools and universities in the capital have been closed since Sunday.Flooding of underpasses on major thoroughfares has sparked traffic chaos for Riyadh's more than five million residents.In May last year, around 20 people were killed in flooding sparked by the kingdom's heaviest rainfall in 25 years.