DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - With 14,000 laborers toiling day and night, the first of Dubai’s three palm-shaped islands is finally about to get its first residents. The Palm Jumeirah, a 12-square-mile island group, is part of what’s billed as the largest land-reclamation project in the world, the product of five years of brute hauling of millions of tons of Persian Gulf sand and quarried rock. On Nov. 30, the palm will open to some 4,000 residents, said Issam Kazim, a spokesman for Dubai’s state-owned developer Nakheel.

When fully complete by 2010, the Palm Jumeirah will be an offshore city, with some 60,000 residents and at least 50,000 workers in 32 hotels and dozens of shops and attractions, Nakheel said.Observers say they are surprised that the fledgling developer has been able to build such a complex project more or less as planned, albeit with several snags that delayed the opening from last year. “The project has captured people’s imagination,” said Colin Foreman of the Middle East Economic Digest. “Nothing like it has been done anywhere else in the world.” Nakheel’s four island projects, the world’s largest land reclamation effort, are reshaping Dubai’s stretch of the Gulf coast. The $14 billion project is a key part of this booming city’s ambitions to rival Singapore and Hong Kong as a business hub, and surpass Las Vegas as a leisure capital. The frenetic pace of development has utterly transformed Dubai from a sleepy trading and pearl-diving village in the 1950s to a flashy metropolis of 1.5 million. The island’s construction has not all been smooth, and most buyers were supposed to get keys to their island homes a year ago.