Moreeb Dune

Where it sits. Moreeb Dune — Tal Moreeb, usually translated as "terrifying mountain" — rises at the southern end of the Liwa arc in the Al Dhafra region of Abu Dhabi Emirate, roughly 15 kilometres south of the village of Mezairaa and about 175 kilometres from Abu Dhabi city. It is a compound star dune standing among the northern ranks of the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter. Its face is commonly given as around 300 metres of vertical rise on a slope approaching 50 degrees, with a slip face something like 1,600 metres wide — figures that shift, because the dune moves. What makes it locally famous is not just the height but the geometry: a long, evenly angled ramp of soft sand with a flat gravel plain at its foot, which is precisely what a motorsport organiser wants.

The story behind it. The dune sits at the meeting point of the Liwa oasis belt, the ancestral territory of the Bani Yas, and the open sand sea to the south. For generations it was a landmark for navigation between the palm villages and the interior rather than a destination. Its modern identity dates from the early 2000s, when the Emirates Motorsport Organisation and the Abu Dhabi authorities established a hill-climb event on the face. Purpose-built sand cars and buggies — many with several hundred horsepower and paddle tyres — attack the slope from a standing start, and the winning runs reach the crest in a handful of seconds. The Liwa International Festival built around it now includes drag races, motorcycle classes, falconry, camel events and date competitions, and turns a stretch of empty desert into a temporary town each winter.

The Empty Quarter around it. North of the dune the interdune corridors hold date palms fed by shallow groundwater; south, the sand runs unbroken toward the Saudi border and beyond, into a desert of roughly 650,000 square kilometres, one of the driest places on earth. Grain size here is fine and well sorted, and the strong iron-oxide coating gives the characteristic orange-red that deepens near sunset. Wildlife is sparse but present: Arabian oryx and sand gazelle in the managed reserves nearby, desert monitor lizards, sand foxes and the tracks that reveal all of them at first light.

On screen. The dune fields around Liwa and Moreeb are the section of the Emirates that international productions come for, though it is worth being exact about what happened where. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) shot the desert planet Jakku in the sands of the Rub' al Khali south of the Liwa oasis in May 2014, building the Niima Outpost as a physical set on the dunes and adding the wrecked Star Destroyer in post-production. Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024) filmed Arrakis in the same dune country, splitting the desert work with Wadi Rum in Jordan. Moreeb itself is the region's most recognisable individual landform and appears constantly in aerials, documentary and commercial work; the specific film sets, however, were built on the surrounding sand flats and lower dunes rather than on the competition face, which is left clear for the motorsport calendar.

What you actually see today. Outside festival weeks the site is an open plain with a grandstand, a track loop and a very large dune. Visitors drive to the base on tarmac and gravel, and the climb on foot is a serious effort — soft sand at that angle means roughly a metre gained for every two spent, and most people take 40 minutes to an hour to reach the crest. The reward is a view over the ridge lines of the Empty Quarter running south with nothing built in any direction. Sandboarding is popular on the lower slopes. There is no shade, no water and no reliable shelter, so the practical rules are simple: go early, carry more water than seems necessary, and treat the surface temperature of the sand as the limiting factor rather than the air temperature.

Getting there and timing. The approach is by road from Mezairaa, which is around two and a half hours from Abu Dhabi and three and a half from Dubai; the final stretch is signposted and paved, though drifting sand can cover it after wind. There is no public transport. Accommodation is in Mezairaa's modest hotels or at the desert resorts in the dunes to the east. December to February is the season, both for temperature and for the festival; the hour after sunrise gives firm sand and long shadow across the face, and the hour before sunset gives the deepest colour.