ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – The inhabitants of the desolate, man-made island off the coast of Abu Dhabi can’t be immediately seen among the breakwater rocks.
But as you draw close, their meows give them away.
A colony of stray cats has swelled on Lulu Island among its barren sandy hills and abandoned buildings that have fallen into disrepair, with the gleaming modern skyline of the United Arab Emirates as a background. The island has lain fallow and largely undeveloped since an ambitious plan by famed Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer to turn it into a “leisure park” fell apart in the 1980s.
A volunteer group is trying to spay and neuter the island’s cats while caring for them in an abandoned modernist’s dream that seems to suit the Arabian Maus living there.
“The flora and the fauna all live in harmony with each other,” said Susan Aylott, who leads the aid group Animal Welfare Abu Dhabi . “Everything lives in harmony with the cats here.”