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Kish is a 91.5-square-kilometre resort island in Bandar Lengeh County, Hormozgān Province, off the southern coast of Iran in the Persian Gulf. Owing to its free trade zone status, the island is touted as a consumer's paradise, with numerous malls, shopping centres, tourist attractions, and resort hotels. It has an estimated population of almost 40,000 residents and about 1 million visitors annually.
In the 1970s, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, turned the island into a luxury resort for the international elite and a tourism hotspot, complete with a Grand Casino (renamed as the Shayan International Hotel after the Iranian Revolution). Kish Airport was designed to handle the Concorde. After the Islamic Revolution, Kish Island became a duty-free shopping center. ( from WIKIPEDIA)
Casino photo from Seventies
The Shah launched in the mid-1970s a plan to turn the island into the Monte Carlo of the Persian Gulf. The plan worked until 1979, when Iran was taken over by the religious, whose laws imposed the shut down of the hotel, bars, casinos, and night clubs. No more gambling - the casino next to the Hotel Shayan was closed and is now a video arcade.
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