Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque
The courtyard is the part to stand still in: a field of white marble inlaid with vines and flowers in coloured stone, cool underfoot at any hour of the day. The pools outside hold the whole building upside down.
The collection
Abu Dhabi
Arabian Gulf · A capital with the Empty Quarter behind it
The slip face of a dune gives way under a boot and the sand slides out ahead with a sound in it, a low note felt through the feet before it is heard — which is why this desert was said to sing for centuries before anyone could account for it. The last streetlight is ninety minutes behind you. By morning every ridge has been recombed and your own tracks are gone.
Abu Dhabi is eighty-seven per cent of the country it governs, and almost none of that is city. The island itself was a fishing and pearling settlement around a watchtower built over a well in the 1760s, and it stayed one until 1958, when the drills found what was under the seabed — so everything on the Corniche is younger than the people who remember it being sand. What that money did here is worth noticing, because it is not what it did forty minutes up the coast: a great mosque with eighty-two domes and a carpet that took two years to knot; a Jean Nouvel museum sitting under a dome that leaks light like a palm canopy; a presidential palace opened to anyone who buys a ticket. And then the road runs south-west, and keeps running, and the Liwa begins — the northern edge of the Rub' al Khali, the largest continuous sand desert on earth, with dunes three hundred metres high and nothing on them. That is the emirate: a capital that behaves like a capital, and behind it, an hour and a half in, the oldest silence in Arabia.
- When to go
- November to March, and in the desert the window matters more than it does on the coast. Winter days sit in the mid-twenties and the January nights in the Liwa can drop to eight degrees, which nobody packs for; that is also when the falcon-and-saluki shows run in full and the outdoor restaurants reopen. December and February are the peak in rate and in booking pressure. June to September the daytime maximum is in the high forties and the whole shape of a day changes — early, indoors, then late — which is exactly why the houses price at half. That is a different holiday rather than a worse one, but go in knowing it. Ramadan moves through the calendar and is worth checking against your dates.
The landmarks
The houses
Rates are quoted for your dates.
4 houses · In our order
Ras Al Akhdar, West Corniche
Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental
A palace built for heads of state, opened as a hotel, with a kilometre and a half of its own beach in front of it.
- 1.5km of sand
- A lazy river
- The ice cave
