7 things you may not know about Kuala Lumpur

Arabiaweather.com - Ismail Qasimi - What do you know about Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia and one of the most important cities in Southeast Asia ? Or rather, what do you not know about this wonderful cosmopolitan city? Perhaps this information will pass you by for the first time in your life, even if you know this city well.

In the 1999 American film Entrapment, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery, the climax of the film takes place inside the Twin Towers and several locations in Kuala Lumpur, although some scenes were also shot at Pinewood Studios in the UK.
The film caused controversy within Malaysia and angered the then prime minister, because the directors had shown the riverside slums to exist under the towers when in reality they were situated in elegant urban surroundings.

Formula 1 racing has taken place in a number of venues outside of Monaco, including the Sepang International Circuit in Kuala Lumpur that hosts this annual international event, and its design has inspired subsequent tracks in Shanghai, Bahrain and Texas.

The name Henry Nicholas Ridley may not be familiar, but he probably affects your daily life more than you can imagine. He is the botanist who founded the rubber industry in the Malay Peninsula and revolutionized the way the crop was grown. Ridley brought the seeds from Kew Gardens in London to plant them in Malaysia, where one of the trees he planted in 1877 still survives.

Port Dickson is one of the closest beaches to Kuala Lumpur, and it is a place full of wildlife. It can house king cobras that can grow up to 18 feet in length and one of that length was caught there in 1837.

The name Kuala Lumpur translates from the Malay language to what it means muddy confluence of rivers . The city was founded where two less flowing rivers meet.

Kuala Lumpur is the eighth most visited city in the world , receiving more than 11 million visitors in 2015 according to Forbes magazine, making it the third most popular tourist destination in Asia Pacific after Bangkok and Singapore, and ahead of a number of major cities such as Barcelona, Rome and Tokyo.

The jungles , home to tigers and the world's largest "Rafflesia" flower, cover more than half of Malaysia's area, where you can find tropical rainforests in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, through the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve that includes plants, rare orchards, animals, waterfalls and wooden bridges, and it was established in 1906 on an area covering about 10 hectares.