A weekend in Abu Dhabi

Saturday: the museum island

Saadiyat, an artificial island devoted entirely to culture, holds the Louvre, which is the reason for the trip: the dome, the rain of light and that idea of ordering art by period rather than civilisation, which has you looking at an African mask beside a Greek sculpture made the same century. Give it three hours, not two.

And now the honest part: that island was announced almost twenty years ago with a Frank Gehry Guggenheim, a national museum by Norman Foster and a Zaha Hadid opera house. The Guggenheim has had over a decade of delays and still hasn’t opened. The opera house wasn’t built. The national museum has been arriving very late. Which means the museum island is, still, mostly a plan.

That takes nothing away from the Louvre, which is magnificent. But it’s worth knowing what you’ll find is a spectacular museum in the middle of a lot with hoardings, and not the cultural quarter from the renders.

Saturday afternoon: the mosque

The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque charges nothing, and that alone brings plenty of people over from Dubai. White marble for forty thousand people, courtyards with flowers inlaid in stone and the largest hand-knotted carpet in the world inside.

It’s worth knowing what you’re looking at, because it isn’t a mosque from one particular tradition: it was designed deliberately mixing Mughal architecture from India, Ottoman and Moorish from al-Andalus, with craftsmen and materials from two dozen countries. It’s a deliberate statement: a new country, with no monumental architecture of its own, building itself a synthesis of the entire Islamic world.

Go an hour before sunset and stay: as the sun drops the exterior lighting comes on, changing tone according to the moon phase that night. From white to blues. It’s the best hour by a distance and also the fullest.

Sunday: Al Ain

An hour and a half inland, up against the Omani border, is Al Ain, and it’s the best of the emirate: the town the ruling family came from and where there’s a real oasis, with over a hundred thousand date palms, listed as World Heritage.

What to see there is the irrigation system, which sounds dull and is astonishing: it’s called falaj and it’s underground and open channels bringing water from aquifers and mountains kilometres away, using only the gradient, with no pumps. They’ve run for three thousand years and they still water the oasis today, sharing the water between plots in turns measured in time. You walk the oasis in shade, with the channels running beside you, and it’s several degrees cooler than outside.

Next to it is Jebel Hafeet, a twelve-hundred-metre mountain with a hairpin road to the summit, and at its foot are Bronze Age tombs five thousand years old. That’s the Abu Dhabi nobody visits.

Sunday night: Yas

Yas, an island devoted to leisure, gathers theme parks, malls and the Formula 1 circuit. If you’re travelling with children it’s half a reason to come to this city. If not, it’s a curious afternoon.

The piece is Ferrari World and its roller coaster, the fastest in the world: it goes from zero to over two hundred and forty an hour in a few seconds, using a hydraulic system like an aircraft carrier’s to launch the cars.

Protective goggles are compulsory, and it isn’t a pose: at that speed, an insect in the eye is a medical problem.

The F1 circuit next door has its own quirk: the race runs at dusk and finishes at night, with the whole track artificially lit, and it was the first on the calendar to do it. You can visit it and even drive on it out of season.