Liwa and the Empty Quarter: Abu Dhabi’s Desert Interior

Two to three hours south-west of Abu Dhabi city, the road runs out of coast and into an arc of date
palm groves more than a hundred kilometres long, backed by some of the largest sand dunes on earth.

This is the Liwa Oasis — the ancestral home of the Bani Yas, the place the ruling
family came from, and the reason there is a city on Abu Dhabi island at all. It is also the subject of a
remarkable amount of confidently wrong writing.

Correction one: Moreeb is not the world’s tallest dune

Tal Moreeb is routinely described as the tallest sand dune in the world, or in the region. Neither is
true, and Abu Dhabi’s own tourism authority never actually says so — its wording is carefully hedged:
“considered by many to be the world’s tallest sand dune”.

Guinness World Records awards the record for tallest free-standing sand dunes to the Badain Jaran
Desert in China, at 480 metres, with an average of 330 metres. Moreeb, at over 300 metres, is not close.

What the authority does state is that Tal Moreeb is “over 300 metres high, with its 50-degree
incline”. We are quoting that and stopping there — because no official source specifies whether the 300
metres is measured above sea level or above the dune’s base, and the 240-metre, 206-metre and 120-metre
figures circulating elsewhere trace to no authority at all.

The 50-degree face is the part that matters in practice. It is why the Moreeb Hill Climb exists, and
why it is one of the more serious motorsport climbs anywhere.

Correction two: there are three festivals, not one

Merging them is the single most common error in published content about Liwa. They have different
subjects, different seasons, different locations and different organisers.

Two further corrections sit inside that table. The motorsport event’s official name is now the
Liwa International Festival — not the “Liwa Date Festival” or the “Moreeb Dune
Festival”. And the organiser of the two heritage festivals is the Abu Dhabi Heritage
Authority, which replaced the Emirates Heritage Club and the Cultural Programs and Heritage
Festivals Committee. Any source crediting the old committee is out of date.

The Al Dhafra Festival has also outgrown its own description. It is frequently written up as a
December event in Madinat Zayed; the current edition runs five stages, with Madinat Zayed only the third
of them. The 20th edition, held under the patronage of President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, runs
from 27 October 2026 to 13 January 2027, with total prize money exceeding AED 97 million and 383 camel
competition rounds. Around it, at the Al Dhafra Traditional Market, run falconry, camel milking, Saktoun
rifle shooting, Arabian horse racing, saluki racing, sheep mazayna and poetry.

The Liwa Dates Festival, meanwhile, reached its 22nd edition in July 2026, drawing more than 465
Emirati farmers across 23 categories competing for 295 prizes worth over AED 8 million, and roughly
80,000 visitors across ten days. Liwa is no longer the emirate’s only dates festival either — the
Heritage Authority has since launched inaugural festivals at Al Ain and Al Wathba.

Correction three: the Empty Quarter is not a World Heritage Site

You will see the Rub’ al Khali, and sometimes Liwa itself, described as UNESCO-listed. Abu Dhabi’s own
UNESCO page lists only the Cultural Sites of Al Ain for this emirate. Neither the Empty Quarter nor Liwa
is inscribed.

What is inscribed is ‘Uruq Bani Ma’arid in Saudi Arabia, listed in 2023 — a reserve on the
desert’s western edge, not the desert itself, and not in the UAE. Our guide to
Al Ain and its oases covers
the site that actually holds the designation.

Correction four: 1761 and 1793 are different events

“Abu Dhabi was founded by the Al Nahyan in 1761” is wrong twice over.

The Abu Dhabi government’s own history states that “it is thought that in 1761, the Bani Yas tribe
discovered drinking water on a remote island” — note the hedge — and separately that the Al Nahyan
“originally lived in the Liwa oasis and settled in Abu Dhabi in 1793”.

So 1761 is the traditional date of the water discovery; 1793 is when the ruling family moved its seat
from Liwa to the island, going on to live at Qasr Al Hosn for almost two centuries. The gazelle in the
founding story is legend rather than official record, and we are treating it as such.

That sequence is the reason to come here. Liwa is not a day trip from the capital’s history — it is
where the capital’s history starts.

What is actually there

Liwa sits at the northern edge of the Rub’ al Khali, the world’s largest uninterrupted desert, and
extends in an east-west arc for more than 100 kilometres, with many dunes rising more than 150 metres.
Its water table sits close to the surface, which is what has supported agriculture and animal husbandry
for generations and produces the striking contrast between green palm groves and orange-red sand.

The Bani Yas lived on camels and livestock, date and crop farming, and pearl diving through the summer
season — travelling from the oasis to the coast and back. That seasonal migration is the thread that
connects Liwa to Abu Dhabi island.

Two forts built more than a century ago survive, alongside seven of that era reconstructed in the
1980s. Al Meel Fort is attributed to the Al Bu Falah during the reign of Sheikh Mohammed bin Shakhbut bin
Dhiyab Al Nahyan, who ruled Abu Dhabi from 1816 to 1818; others include Dhafeer, Sabbanah, Maria Al
Sharqiya and Muzeira’a.

Al Dhafra as a region stretches from the Liwa desert to the west coast and the offshore islands.

Getting there

Two to three hours’ drive from Abu Dhabi city, per the tourism authority. We are giving the drive time
rather than a distance deliberately: the “150 km” and “250 km” figures both circulate, they contradict
each other, and no official source publishes a kilometre figure at all.

For the built version of the emirate’s ambitions, our guides to the
Saadiyat Cultural
District, the
Sheikh Zayed Grand
Mosque and Masdar City
cover what the capital built with what the desert paid for, and our piece on
Abu
Dhabi’s cultural rise traces the money.

Liwa is the counterweight to all of it: a hundred kilometres of palm groves and a 300-metre dune, in
the region that fed the family that built the rest.

Primary sources: the Department of Culture and Tourism on
Liwa
Oasis, Tal
Moreeb,
the
Al Dhafra region, the
Liwa
International Festival and
Abu
Dhabi’s UNESCO sites; the Abu Dhabi Media Office on the
22nd
Liwa Dates Festival, the
20th
Al Dhafra Festival and the
Abu
Dhabi Heritage Authority; the Abu Dhabi Registration Office’s
history
of Abu Dhabi; and
Guinness
World Records on the highest sand dunes.