Liwa Desert

The Liwa Desert marks the northern reach of the Rub al Khali — the Empty Quarter — the largest continuous sand desert in the world, covering more than 650,000 square kilometres across Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, and the UAE. The dunes here are not the undulating waves of popular imagination but are among the tallest on earth: Some individual dunes in the Liwa area rise more than 100 metres above the sabkha flats that surround them, and their crest lines are so sharp and symmetrical that they appear to have been drawn rather than shaped by wind. The sand is a deep ochre-orange that light transforms throughout the day: pale and almost white at dawn, vivid amber by mid-morning, bleached almost yellow at noon, and then a rich burnt orange at sunset.

The date palm oases that punctuate the desert — Liwa itself is a string of them running roughly east to west — are the agricultural foundation of the region. The green of the date groves against the orange dunes is one of the most striking colour contrasts in the Arabian Peninsula: tall slender palms with frond shadows that move visibly in a light breeze, surrounded by the hard baked earth of the sabkha. The oases support permanent settlements and have done so for centuries, in contrast to the dune fields which are uninhabited except by transient Bedouin and the occasional off-road enthusiast.

Moreeb Dune, also called Tal Mireb, is the most dramatic single feature in the Liwa area: a massive dune approximately 300 metres high and with a slope that has made it the centrepiece of the annual Liwa Desert Festival, a date festival that also features camel racing and traditional sports. The dune is named for the word for dangerous in Arabic, and its slopes are used for off-road driving and dune-bashing — an activity that draws large numbers of visitors from Dubai and Abu Dhabi at weekends. For those who prefer to experience the desert in stillness rather than speed, the dune's crest offers views across a sea of similar dunes stretching to the Saudi border.

The silence of the Liwa desert is its own discovery. After the constant noise of Abu Dhabi or Dubai — traffic, construction, announcements — the near-total quiet of the dune field is physically striking. There is wind, and the creak and hiss of sand grains shifting in a breeze, and occasionally the sound of a vehicle far away, but the default state is a silence broken only by your own footsteps and breathing. At night, in a region with low cloud cover and minimal light pollution, the stars are genuinely extraordinary: the Milky Way is dense and bright, and the desert floor remains warm for hours after sunset, making night camping comfortable without extreme cold.

The Liwa oases lie approximately 250 kilometres south of Abu Dhabi city along a sealed highway that runs straight as a rule across the sabkha flats. The drive takes about two and a half hours and passes through almost no settlements — just flat coastal plain, then the sabkha, then the first dunes appearing on the horizon. The road ends at the oasis towns, and beyond them the dunes are accessible only by 4WD on unmarked sand tracks.

The Liwa Desert sits at the northern edge of the Rub al Khali — the world's largest continuous sand desert — with dunes among the tallest on earth.

The contrast between the towering orange dunes and the green date palm oases is one of the most striking landscapes in the Arabian Peninsula.

Night stargazing in the Liwa is exceptional: the Milky Way is prominent, the horizon is clear in every direction, and there is almost no artificial light for tens of kilometres.