A country · 110 places · 6 regions
United Arab Emirates, all of it.
110 curated places across 6 regions — photographed, mapped, and noted with the season each is best in.
The 4 biggest regions — Emirate of Dubai, Emirate of Abu Dhabi, Emirate of Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah — read below as chapters, with 2 more waiting past them.
Chapter I · Emirate of Dubai · 31 places
Emirate of Dubai
The Burj Khalifa rises from Downtown Dubai at the First Interchange of Sheikh Zayed Road, roughly two kilometres inland from the Gulf and midway between the old creek quarters of Deira and Bur Dubai and the newer towers of Dubai Marina. Its total height is 829.8 metres, with 828 metres to the top of a 242.6-metre spire and 163 usable floors, figures that have kept it the tallest structure on earth since it topped out in 2009. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed it, with Adrian Smith as chief architect and Bill Baker as structural engineer. The plan is a buttressed core: a hexagonal concrete spine braced by three wings in a Y shape that steps back in stages as the tower climbs, so that no single face ever presents a flat wall to the wind and no vortex can build up along its full height. How it was built. Construction began on 12 January 2004, the exterior was completed on 1 October 2009, and the building opened on 4 January 2010. The primary structure is high-performance reinforced concrete, poured at night in the hot months and pumped to record heights, switching to structural steel for the spire near the summit; some of that steel was salvaged from the demolished Palace of the Republic in East Berlin. The cladding runs to more than 26,000 glass panels set in aluminium and textured stainless steel, specified to survive surface temperatures that would craze ordinary glazing. The tower was called Burj Dubai throughout construction and was renamed at the opening ceremony for Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, after Abu Dhabi and the federal government supported Dubai through the debt crisis of 2008 and 2009. On screen. The tower carries one of the most recognisable action sequences of the last twenty years. In Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011), directed by Brad Bird, Ethan Hunt has to reach a server room by climbing the outside of the building above the 120th floor using adhesive gloves, one of which fails partway up. The unit filmed in Dubai in late 2010 and early 2011 with IMAX cameras. Tom Cruise performed the exterior work himself, secured at all times by multiple cables that Industrial Light & Magic erased in post-production; the vertigo in the finished scene comes from the real depth of field below him rather than from a set. Paula Patton and Lea Seydoux also declined doubles for their fight in the same section of the film. Dubai contributed the sandstorm car chase that follows, and the film held its world premiere at the Dubai International Film Festival on 7 December 2011, which is why the tower features so heavily in its marketing. What you actually see today. Visitors reach two separate observation levels. At the Top occupies floors 124 and 125 at about 452 metres, with an outdoor terrace and telescopes; At the Top SKY sits on level 148 at 555 metres and is sold as a slower, lounge-style visit with a separate lift. The ride up takes about a minute. Looking down, the geometry of Dubai is legible in a way it never is at street level: the reclaimed fronds of Palm Jumeirah to the west, the ruler-straight line of Sheikh Zayed Road running south, the low sand-coloured sprawl of the older city to the north-east, and the desert edge dissolving into haze inland. The lower floors house the Armani Hotel and a long run of private residences, which is why the public route is tightly channelled. The ground level. The base is arguably the better photographic position. Burj Khalifa Lake, an artificial basin of about 12 hectares, holds the Dubai Fountain, a WET Design system 275 metres long whose strongest jets throw water some 152 metres into the air in choreographed evening shows at half-hour intervals. Dubai Mall, opened on 4 November 2008, wraps the north-east side; Souk Al Bahar and the promenade across the water give the cleanest full-height view of the tower, especially in the twenty minutes after sunset when the facade lighting comes up but the sky still has colour. The plaza also carries the LED display that turns the whole east face into a screen on national holidays. Getting there and timing. The Dubai Metro Red Line stops at Burj Khalifa/Dubai Mall, connected to the mall by a long air-conditioned walkway of about ten to fifteen minutes; taxis drop closer. November to March is the workable season, with daytime highs in the twenties and the clearest air. Between June and September temperatures pass 45 degrees and humidity blurs the view. Timed-entry tickets for sunset slots are the first to sell out and cost noticeably more than midday ones; midday visits are cheaper but hazier, and early morning gives the sharpest horizon.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter II · Emirate of Abu Dhabi · 22 places
Emirate of Abu Dhabi
The Liwa Oasis is a crescent of villages and date gardens strung along roughly 100 kilometres at the northern edge of the Rub' al Khali, in the Al Dhafra region of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, about 150 kilometres southwest of Abu Dhabi city and close to the Saudi border. The crescent opens northward, and behind it the sand rises into the largest continuous sand sea on earth: dunes here run to 200 and 300 metres, in longitudinal chains and star forms, with a colour that shifts from pale gold in the north to a deep apricot-red as the iron-coated grains dominate further south. Mezairaa, Muzayri' and Hameem are the main settlements; between them, groundwater within reach of hand-dug wells sustains date plantations, which is the entire reason the oasis exists. Why it matters to the country. Liwa is the ancestral home of the Bani Yas, the tribal confederation from which the Al Nahyan family — rulers of Abu Dhabi and the founding house of the United Arab Emirates — emerged before moving to the coast in the eighteenth century. That gives the place a weight in Emirati identity out of proportion to its population. Archaeology in the wider Al Dhafra area has recovered material going back millennia, and the restored mudbrick forts, including Dhafeer Fort at Mezairaa on its ridge above the plantations, mark the old caravan and raiding country. Date cultivation remains commercially real rather than ornamental: the annual Liwa Date Festival judges fruit by variety and weight, and the Al Dhafra Festival brings camel beauty competitions, saluki racing and falconry to a temporary town in the desert each winter. On screen — Jakku and Arrakis. Liwa's screen credits belong to two of the largest science-fiction properties in the world, and it is worth separating them precisely. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) shot the desert planet Jakku in the Rub' al Khali around Liwa, with a second unit working quietly in April 2014 and principal photography opening in Abu Dhabi on 16 May. It was the first Star Wars production to film in the Gulf. Large partial sets went up on the sand — spacecraft, towers and the Niima Outpost market, where a controlled explosion left a crater — and the material was cut together with stage work at Pinewood. Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024) both used the Liwa desert for Arrakis, alongside Wadi Rum in Jordan and stages in Budapest, with Denis Villeneuve's crews working in the cooler months. The high, clean-crested dunes and the absence of vegetation or infrastructure in frame are what productions come for. Travellers should not expect markers or a set to visit. Nothing survives on the ground from either production, and the shooting areas are simply dunes on the edge of a very large desert; the honest way to see them is a dune drive from one of the Liwa hotels. The Empty Quarter behind it. Liwa is the practical doorway to the Rub' al Khali, which covers roughly 650,000 square kilometres across Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen and the UAE and is the largest continuous body of sand on the planet, with rainfall under 35 millimetres a year and no permanent settlements in its interior. The British explorer Wilfred Thesiger came through Liwa in 1948, between his two crossings of the sand sea with Bedu companions, and his account of small walled gardens, wells and wealth measured in dates and camels is the last detailed picture of the oasis before oil revenue rebuilt it. The transition from tarmac to trackless sand still happens within a few hundred metres of the road. Moreeb Dune. The best-known single feature is Tal Moreeb, a slip face roughly 300 metres high with a slope steep enough — around 50 degrees at the top — to have become a motorsport venue. The Liwa International Festival hill climb sends modified buggies, quad bikes and trucks straight up it, and even outside event weeks the flat gravel plain at its base is used by drivers testing runs. Standing at the bottom gives the clearest possible sense of scale in a landscape that otherwise offers nothing to measure against. Getting there and timing. The drive from Abu Dhabi takes two to two and a half hours on good motorway to Mezairaa, then progressively smaller roads. Beyond the tarmac, soft sand requires a four-wheel drive with deflated tyres and someone who knows how to read a dune face; solo driving into the Rub' al Khali without recovery gear and a second vehicle is genuinely dangerous, and there is no mobile coverage across much of it. Accommodation is concentrated at Qasr Al Sarab, a resort built as a mud-coloured fort in the dunes about 20 kilometres off the road, with a smaller hotel at Mezairaa. Summer temperatures pass 48C and the season effectively shuts down between June and September. Winter mornings bring cold air and, occasionally, fog pooling between the dune chains at dawn — the single best photographic condition the oasis offers. Resort interiors are accessible; the dunes themselves are not.
✦ November to February · $$
Chapter III · Emirate of Sharjah · 9 places
Emirate of Sharjah
A museum housed in a former souk on the Sharjah waterfront, gathering manuscripts, ceramics, scientific instruments and coins from across the Islamic world. A domed ceiling painted with the zodiac crowns its central gallery.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter IV · Ras Al Khaimah · 8 places
Ras Al Khaimah
At approximately 1,934 metres, Jebel Jais is the highest peak in the UAE, rising from the northern Hajar range in Ras Al Khaimah emirate. A paved mountain road ascends through successive bands of rock strata to viewpoints offering panoramas across Oman and the Gulf of Oman on clear days. The summit plateau is dramatically cold compared to the coast in winter, often approaching freezing overnight.
✦ October to April
Regions of United Arab Emirates
Every place in United Arab Emirates
