Etihad Towers

Where it sits. Etihad Towers occupies the western end of the Abu Dhabi corniche, on the Ras Al Akhdar headland directly opposite the Emirates Palace hotel and a short drive from the Presidential Palace at Qasr Al Watan. The complex is five towers, not one: Tower 1 at 277 metres and 69 floors, Tower 2 at 305 metres and 74 floors, Tower 3 at 260 metres, Tower 4 at 234 metres and Tower 5 at 218 metres, all rising from a shared podium of shops and restaurants. Towers 2 and 5 topped out in November 2010, and the estimated construction cost was around 2.5 billion dirhams. The towers lean and taper rather than standing as plain slabs, so the group reads from the water as a single sculpted cluster, which is exactly how it appears in the aerial shots that made it famous.

On screen. This is the building that a Lykan HyperSport is driven through in Furious 7 (2015). In the sequence, Dominic Toretto and Brian O'Conner steal the car from a party high inside one tower, then jump it through the glass and across into the neighbouring tower, and again into a third, before the brakes fail. The gag is deliberately absurd and it is anchored in a real place: Abu Dhabi hosted the shoot in 2014, and the production chose the emirate over Dubai in part because of a thirty per cent rebate on qualifying spend. Only 7 of the Lykan HyperSports were ever built by W Motors, a Lebanese manufacturer, and the film used replicas for the stunts. Abu Dhabi also supplied the desert sequences of the same film in the dunes of the Liwa area inland. Together they mark the point where the Fast and Furious series stopped being a street-racing franchise and became a globe-hopping action series.

What is actually inside. Tower 1 holds a hotel, opened in November 2011 as the Jumeirah at Etihad Towers and rebranded in October 2020 as Conrad Abu Dhabi Etihad Towers. Tower 2, the tallest, contains offices and the Observation Deck at 300 on the 75th floor, reached from the hotel via a linking podium at low level. The deck is a lounge rather than an open terrace: floor-to-ceiling glass, a set minimum spend that is redeemable against food and drink, and a view that runs along the whole corniche, over the low-rise government quarter and out to the shipping channels. Towers 3 and 5 are residential, Tower 4 is offices, and the podium level holds a mall with a supermarket, cafes and a cinema, which is useful because this end of the corniche has little else at street level.

The setting. The stretch of water in front of the towers is one of the few places where Abu Dhabi looks like a coastal city rather than an inland one. The corniche promenade runs about eight kilometres east from here with a separated cycle lane, public beaches with lifeguards, and shaded pavilions at intervals; the section directly below Etihad Towers is the quietest. Emirates Palace, opposite, is a 2005 hotel built at enormous cost with a dome sequence and its own marina, and the Founder Memorial garden a few minutes east commemorates Sheikh Zayed with a suspended geometric portrait. Late afternoon light hits the towers head on from the west across the water, which is when the photograph everyone recognises from the film becomes possible.

Practical notes. Abu Dhabi has no metro; a taxi from the city centre takes about ten minutes and from Zayed International Airport around forty. Public buses serve the corniche. The observation deck operates on set opening hours with a minimum spend, and slots around sunset fill first. Note that the facade of the towers was damaged by drone debris during the 2026 strikes on Iran, so parts of the complex may be under repair; check current access before planning a visit around the deck specifically.

When to come. From November to March, daytime temperatures sit in the low twenties to high twenties and the corniche is genuinely pleasant on foot. April and October are hot but manageable in the early morning. Between June and September the combination of heat and humidity on this coast is severe, and outdoor time is realistically limited to after dark. The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in late November and the winter events season push hotel rates in the whole city sharply upward for a few weeks, so travellers on a fixed budget usually do better in January or February.