Abu Dhabi is the country's capital and it shows: wide avenues, plenty of greenery watered in the middle of the desert and a slower pace than Dubai. Anyone arriving with skyscrapers in mind finds something else first: the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, huge and white, with free admission, and an eight-kilometre seafront promenade, the Corniche, where families come out to walk once the sun goes down. It is a city to take at your own pace.
In recent years Abu Dhabi has built one of the most ambitious cultural districts in the Arab world on Saadiyat Island: the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Zayed National Museum, the Natural History Museum, teamLab Phenomena and, from December 2026, the Guggenheim. Add to that the Qasr Al Hosn fort, where the city began, and the Qasr Al Watan presidential palace, which you can tour inside and which lights up at night with a light show.
If you are travelling with kids or you like an adrenaline rush, Yas Island packs in Ferrari World, Warner Bros. World, Yas Waterworld and SeaWorld, with free internal transfers. And if you want to see the country as it used to be, an hour and a half away is Al Ain, with its palm oasis watered by ancient channels. Keep an eye on your budget: it is not a cheap destination, but under-18s get into the big museums for free and many of the best things cost nothing.
Abu Dhabi's history as a city begins in 1761, when a hunting party from the Bani Yas tribe, who lived in the Liwa oasis, found fresh water on the island. According to the Department of Culture and Tourism, around 1790 a watchtower was built over that well, the city's first permanent structure, and in 1795 Sheikh Shakhbut bin Dhiyab moved the seat of power from Liwa to the island and built the fort we know today as Qasr Al Hosn. During the 19th century the economy lived off fishing and, above all, pearl diving; the long rule of Zayed bin Khalifa (1855-1909), 'Zayed the First', was a period of stability. In the 1930s the pearl trade collapsed because of the global depression and the arrival of Japanese cultured pearls. The way out came through oil: in 1939 a 75-year concession was signed, in 1958 crude was struck in the offshore Umm Shaif field and in 1959 onshore, at Murban. On 6 August 1966 Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan took power and used oil revenue to build the modern city, and on 2 December 1971 Abu Dhabi and five other emirates founded the United Arab Emirates, with Zayed as its first president and Abu Dhabi as its capital. Zayed died in 2004 and is buried next to the Grand Mosque, which opened in 2007. Then came Formula 1 on Yas Island (2009), Ferrari World (2010), the Louvre Abu Dhabi (November 2017), Qasr Al Hosn as a museum (2018), the Abrahamic Family House (2023), the Natural History Museum (November 2025) and the Zayed National Museum (December 2025). The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opens on 11 December 2026.
Read the full history ↓The capital and the country's richest emirate: from the Liwa oasis and the founding on the island to oil, the Grand Mosque, the Louvre on Saadiyat and Formula 1 on Yas.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The name of the capital of the Emirates holds a legend. 'Abu Dhabi' means 'father of the gazelle' in Arabic, and tradition has it that a group of Bedouin hunters followed the tracks of a gazelle across the desert to an island off the coast, where the animal unwittingly led them to something far more valuable than their prey: a freshwater spring. In a dry, salty land like that of the Persian Gulf, finding drinking water was a treasure, and the settlement grew up around that well.
The historical facts match the spirit of the legend. Around 1761, a party from the Bani Yas tribe found fresh water on that flat, desert island, and shortly afterwards a permanent settlement was established there. The Al Nahyan family, a branch of the Bani Yas that came from the Liwa oasis inland, moved its base to Abu Dhabi around 1793 and built a tower and a fort beside the well: the seed of what is now Qasr Al Hosn, the oldest building in the city. The Al Nahyan have ruled Abu Dhabi ever since, and today they lead the whole country.
For almost two centuries, life on that island was hard and austere. The inhabitants lived from fishing, camel herding and, above all, pearl diving in the waters of the Gulf, while the ruling clan split its time between the coast and the Al Ain oasis inland. It was a Bedouin, seafaring world of subsistence, a far cry from the monumental city of today.
Like the whole Persian Gulf coast, Abu Dhabi lived for generations to the rhythm of pearls. Every summer, crews set sail in their dhows for months at a time, heading for the oyster beds; the divers went down to the bottom again and again, with no equipment beyond a nose clip and a stone tied to their foot, in gruelling and dangerous work. Pearls were the main source of wealth and trade, and almost the entire population depended on them.
Politically, Abu Dhabi was the largest of the small emirates on the coast, controlling a vast inland desert territory that stretched to the Liwa oasis, on the edge of the great Rub' al Khali ('the Empty Quarter'), and to Al Ain. Throughout the 19th century, this whole coastal strip came under the protection of the British Empire: the so-called Trucial States signed treaties with London that put an end to maritime conflicts and piracy, and secured the route to India. The British handled foreign relations; the sheikhs, internal affairs.
The blow came, as it did across the Gulf, in the 1920s and 1930s. The development of Japanese cultured pearls, combined with the worldwide Great Depression, sank the price of natural pearls and ruined the region's economy. Abu Dhabi fell into deep poverty. Many emigrated; those who stayed got by on fishing and very little else. It seemed like the end of a world. But beneath those waters and those sands lay something that would change everything.
In 1958, after years of exploration, oil was discovered in enormous quantities off the coast of Abu Dhabi, in the offshore Umm Shaif field, and soon afterwards in onshore fields. The first crude exports began in 1962. Abu Dhabi turned out to be, by a wide margin, the most oil-rich emirate in the whole region: beneath its land and sea lay most of the reserves of what would become the future country. All at once, one of the poorest corners of the Gulf became one of the richest.
But wealth alone is not enough if nobody knows how to use it. In the early years, the ruler at the time, Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan, distrusted oil money and hoarded it without investing it, holding back development. In 1966, the Al Nahyan family replaced him with his brother, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who had already governed the Al Ain oasis successfully and had a very different vision: to use oil to transform his people's lives.
Zayed set about building a modern emirate almost from scratch: schools, hospitals, roads, housing, running water, electricity. He promoted agriculture in the desert (one of his obsessions was to 'green' the land) and laid the foundations of a capital city where before there had been only sand and a few mud houses. Within a few years, Abu Dhabi began to look like a city. And Zayed, respected and well loved, became the most important political figure on the entire coast.
In the late 1960s, the United Kingdom announced its withdrawal from the Persian Gulf and the end of the protection treaties. The small emirates on the coast were left on their own in an unstable region, surrounded by powerful neighbours. Sheikh Zayed saw clearly that the only way forward was unity, and he set out to persuade the other rulers to create a common federal state.
His efforts paid off. On 2 December 1971 the United Arab Emirates was born, a federation that brought together Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al Quwain and Fujairah; Ras al Khaimah joined in early 1972. Zayed was elected the country's first president, a post he would hold for more than three decades, until his death in 2004. And Abu Dhabi, the largest emirate and by far the richest in oil, became the capital of the new nation.
As the capital and the main source of resources, Abu Dhabi funded much of the country's development and became the centre of political power. Oil revenue was managed through sovereign wealth funds that today rank among the largest in the world, investing the wealth for future generations. The city grew in a planned way, with wide tree-lined avenues, gardens watered in the middle of the desert and increasingly ambitious architecture. Zayed always insisted on one idea: true wealth is not money, but people, education and care for the land.
21st-century Abu Dhabi is a prosperous, modern capital, and surprisingly green for a city in the middle of the desert. Unlike Dubai, which bet everything on trade, tourism and spectacle, Abu Dhabi built its image on the solidity of oil, institutional weight and, over the last two decades, an ambitious bet on culture and knowledge. Aware that crude will not last forever, the emirate is investing in diversifying its economy towards finance, industry, clean energy and cultural tourism.
The symbol of that bet is Saadiyat Island, conceived as a major cultural district. It was there that the Louvre Abu Dhabi opened in 2017, the first Louvre outside France, beneath a spectacular perforated dome designed by Jean Nouvel; and it is there that other major museums are going up, such as the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Zayed National Museum, dedicated to the father of the nation. Add to this the dazzling Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, where the sheikh is buried, the Qasr Al Watan palace, which is open to the public, and the international universities that have set up in the city.
The figure of Sheikh Zayed still presides, almost literally, over the life of the country: his portrait is everywhere, and the Founder's Memorial pays tribute to him in the heart of the capital. Like every Gulf state, Abu Dhabi has its light and shade: the enormous weight of the migrant labour that keeps the economy running, the limits on political freedoms, the challenges of sustainability. But its story, that of an island of pearl divers that within a single generation became the capital of a wealthy country and a cultural beacon for the region, is one of the most astonishing transformations of the modern world. And it all began, legend has it, by following a gazelle to a spring.
