It merely provoked angry locals into questioning why so much money had been spent on a seemingly irrelevant bit oflandreclamation rather than on themselves.
Tensions over the battle of the ports have been running high - exacerbated by a landreclamation project just off the coast of Singapore which Malaysia says is affecting the flow and depth of the shipping channel.
Prince Albert II, the reigning monarch, has flirted with the idea of another land-reclamation project, inviting bids and briefly giving his support in 2010 to a design by Daniel Libeskind, the architect who drew up the master plan for the reconstruction of New York's World Trade Center.
The government itself accelerated the trend, releasing huge tracts ofland to private developers while pouring tax revenues into expensive desert-reclamation projects.