Few cities in the world impress as quickly as Dubai. In a single day you can go up the tallest building on the planet, ski on snow inside a shopping mall in the middle of the desert, sandboard down a dune at sunset and have dinner in a skyscraper with the Persian Gulf at your feet. It's a city that set out to be the biggest, the tallest and the most luxurious at everything, and that in half a century went from a handful of mud houses by the Creek to a global metropolis of glass and steel. It dazzles, it overwhelms and it never leaves you indifferent.
But Dubai isn't just records and extravagance. Behind the malls and skyscrapers an older soul survives: the wind-tower alleys of Al Fahidi, the wooden abras that cross the Creek for a few cents, the scent of the spice souk, the glitter of the gold souk and the memory of the pearl divers and merchants who made the city rich long before oil. That contrast between the ancient and the hyper-futuristic is perhaps the most fascinating thing about the place.
This guide helps you get around this two-sided Dubai in a practical way: when to go so you don't melt in the heat, how to use the metro and the Nol card, what the Burj Khalifa, the desert and the parks really cost, what to book in advance, how to cross to Old Dubai by abra and what to respect in a Muslim Gulf country. Whether you come for the luxury, the beach, the desert or out of curiosity, Dubai has plenty to surprise you with.
Dubai began as a modest village of fishermen and pearl divers on the shores of a saltwater inlet, the Creek, inhabited for centuries and already mentioned in the 18th century. In 1833, the Bani Yas tribe, led by the Al Maktoum family —which still rules the emirate—, settled by the Creek and founded modern Dubai. During the 19th and early 20th centuries the city lived off maritime trade and pearl diving, until Japanese cultured pearls sank that business in the 1930s. It was a shrewd free port that attracted merchants from Persia and India. Everything changed with oil, discovered in 1966: driven by Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Dubai invested its new wealth in infrastructure, and when the United Arab Emirates federation was born in 1971, it was already a rising commercial power. Aware that its oil was limited, it bet on tourism, trade, aviation and finance, building within a few decades the skyline, the artificial islands and the records that make it world-famous today. We tell that dizzying story, from pearls to skyscrapers, on our history page.
Read the full history ↓If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have over 50 activities in Dubai. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
It's hard to picture today, among glass skyscrapers and artificial islands, but Dubai was born from something as modest as a saltwater creek. The Creek —Khor Dubai in Arabic— is an inlet of the sea that runs some fourteen kilometres inland and separates the city's two oldest neighbourhoods, Deira and Bur Dubai. For centuries, that creek was the place's only reason for being: a natural, sheltered harbour where boats could anchor, nets could dry and divers could set out.
Because Dubai's first fortune wasn't oil, it was pearls. The warm, shallow waters of the Persian Gulf held some of the world's great pearl oyster beds, and for generations the men of the coast earned their living by diving. Every summer, crews set out in their dhows for months at a time; the divers went down again and again, with no equipment, a clip on their nose and a stone tied to their foot, holding their breath to prise oysters from the seabed. It was gruelling, dangerous work, badly paid and buried in debt, but it drove the economy of the whole region until well into the 20th century.
Around the Creek grew a small settlement of fishermen, divers and merchants. The neighbourhoods of Bur Dubai and Deira, with their mud-and-coral houses and their wind towers —the ingenious 'air conditioners' that caught the breeze and cooled the rooms—, are the historic heart of that early Dubai, the one you can still explore on foot or cross by abra for one dirham.
Modern Dubai has a fairly clear birth date: 1833. That year, some eight hundred members of the Bani Yas tribe, led by Sheikh Maktoum bin Butti Al Maktoum, broke away from the neighbouring emirate of Abu Dhabi and settled at the mouth of the Creek. In doing so they founded the Al Maktoum line, the dynasty that still rules Dubai today, almost two centuries later.
From very early on, Dubai's rulers showed a commercial instinct that would shape the city's character. The whole coast —the so-called Trucial States— had been under British influence and protection since treaties signed in the 19th century to curb piracy and secure the route to India. Within that framework, Dubai understood before anyone else that its future lay in being an open, welcoming port for merchants.
The masterstroke came in the early 20th century. When the authorities in the Persian port of Lingah, across the Gulf, raised taxes, Dubai's ruler responded by scrapping tariffs and barriers to trade, and invited merchants to settle in his city. Many Persian and Indian merchant families crossed the Gulf and put down roots in Dubai, bringing capital, contacts and commercial know-how. That free-port policy —low taxes, open arms to immigration and business— made Dubai the great marketplace of the coast and laid the foundations for everything that followed. The city was already, in essence, what it still is: a place made for trade.
The first big blow to Dubai came from an unexpected place: Japan. In the 1920s and 1930s, the development of Japanese cultured pearls —mass-produced and cheap— sank the price of the Gulf's natural pearls. On top of that disaster came the worldwide Great Depression. Within a few years, the industry that had sustained Dubai and the whole region for centuries collapsed, and the city fell into harsh poverty. Many families emigrated; those who stayed survived on trade, fishing and smuggling through the Creek.
For decades, Dubai kept betting on what it knew how to do: trade. Under the long rule of Sheikh Saeed bin Maktoum and, above all, his son Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum —often called the 'father of modern Dubai'—, the city invested in its port and in dredging the Creek so larger ships could come in. Rashid had one obsession: modernising infrastructure to attract business.
And then, in 1966, everything changed. Oil was discovered in the offshore Fateh field, off the coast of Dubai. The first exports began in 1969. The emirate never had as much oil as its neighbour Abu Dhabi, but what it had arrived at the right moment and in the right hands. Instead of handing it out or squandering it, Sheikh Rashid poured it into projects that would multiply wealth: a deep-water port, the airport, roads, the free zone. Oil wasn't Dubai's destiny, but the fuel to reinvent itself once again.
In the late 1960s, the United Kingdom announced it would withdraw from the Persian Gulf and end the protection treaties it held with the Trucial emirates. The small coastal territories were suddenly left to fend for themselves in a turbulent region. The answer was union. Driven above all by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, and backed by Sheikh Rashid of Dubai, the creation of a federal state was negotiated.
On 2 December 1971, the United Arab Emirates officially came into being, a federation bringing together Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al Quwain and Fujairah; Ras al Khaimah joined a few months later, in early 1972. Sheikh Zayed was the country's first president —a post he would hold until his death in 2004— and Abu Dhabi, the largest and most oil-rich emirate, became the capital. Dubai, the federation's second power, gained decisive weight: by tradition, the ruler of Dubai would be the country's vice president and prime minister.
That federation of seven emirates, each with its own ruling family, proved surprisingly stable and prosperous. The combination of Abu Dhabi's huge oil wealth and Dubai's commercial drive shaped a young state that, in barely half a century, went from a handful of coastal villages to one of the most modern and wealthy countries in the Middle East. For Dubai, being part of the Emirates gave it the stability and backing to launch, fearlessly, into its most ambitious transformation.
Aware that its oil would run out —today it accounts for a tiny share of its economy—, Dubai made a bold decision: not to live off crude, but to use it to build something else. Driven first by Sheikh Rashid and then by his son, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the emirate set out to become a global hub for trade, tourism, aviation, logistics and finance. The strategy was to diversify until oil no longer mattered.
The milestones came at dizzying speed. The Jebel Ali free zone was created, home to one of the largest man-made ports in the world. The airline Emirates, founded in 1985, turned Dubai into an air hub linking continents and made its airport one of the busiest on the planet. Then came the megaprojects that made the city world-famous: the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel (1999), the artificial islands of the Palm Jumeirah, gigantic malls and, in 2010, the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world at 828 metres. The city filled up with superlatives.
The path wasn't a straight line: the 2009 financial crisis hit the Dubai of bricks and easy credit hard, and it took a bailout from neighbouring Abu Dhabi —hence the great tower bears the name of Sheikh Khalifa—. But the city recovered and kept growing, with new icons such as the Museum of the Future and Expo 2020 (held in 2021-2022). Today Dubai is a global metropolis of more than three million people, where over two hundred nationalities live side by side and 90% of the population is foreign. Behind the glitter there are still shadows —the weight of the migrant labour that built the city, the limits on freedoms, the sustainability of so much luxury in the middle of the desert—. But the underlying story is astonishing: within the lifetime of a single elderly person, Dubai went from diving for pearls beside a creek to brushing the clouds. Few cities in the world have reinvented themselves so fast and on such a grand scale.
