This capital is an island, and it had no bridge until 1968.
Abu Dhabi occupies a T-shaped island reaching into the Persian Gulf, separated from the mainland by less than 250 metres of water. That narrow channel was not crossed by road until 1968. Almost everything that defines the city today — the layout, the mangroves, the new districts — follows from that.
01 Two hundred and fifty metres
That figure is deceptively small. Two hundred and fifty metres of water do not sound like much until you have to cross them with building materials, with water tankers, or with a whole city's worth of people. For centuries the settlement lived off what lay around the island — fishing and pearls — not off what lay behind it.
The name says everything about the earlier scale: Abu Dhabi means, literally, "father of gazelle". That is not the name of a great port or a capital: it is the name you give a place for what you see there.
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02 The three bridges
The first was the Al Maqta bridge, in 1968, now part of the E22 highway. The second, Mussafah, in 1977, built into the E20. The third is the Sheikh Zayed bridge, completed in 2010 and designed by Zaha Hadid, part of the E10.
And they do not end there. One bridge leads to Al Reem island — completed in early 2011, with 27 lanes — and another, of five lanes, to Saadiyat island. What began as a single crossing over a channel has become a system of links between islands.
03 What lies between island and land
Look at a satellite image and you will see that between the island and the mainland there is no open sea: there is a tangle of shallow channels, sandbanks and green patches. Those patches are mangroves, and they are not a scenic detail: they are the ecosystem that holds the coast together.
On the island's eastern side, at the Al Qurm corniche, there is a mangrove national park. And these waters hold the world's largest population of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins. It is a fact almost nobody associates with this city, and it places it better than any skyscraper.
04 The emirate behind the city
The city covers 972 square kilometres and had 2,189,860 inhabitants in 2024. But the emirate it belongs to is of another order: 67,340 square kilometres, 87% of the total surface of the United Arab Emirates, with 4,135,985 inhabitants in 2024.
Within that surface lie some two hundred islands spread along 700 kilometres of coast, and inland, dunes exceeding 300 metres in height in the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, around the Liwa Oasis. The capital is an island; the territory it administers is, above all, sand.
05 How to walk it
The usual mistake is to stay on the western corniche, the one in the photographs: the beach, the towers, the promenade. It is fine, but it is the façade. The interesting side is the eastern one, facing the channel and the mangroves, because that is where you see the real relationship between the city and the water around it.
It is worth crossing the bridges slowly, even by taxi, and looking down. You see the shallow green water, the sandbanks, the mangrove line. It is the only moment when the city's geography becomes obvious from inside it.
And keep the scale of the place in mind before planning. Going from the main island to Saadiyat is crossing a bridge; reaching the Liwa dunes means three hours into the desert. Both are the same emirate, but not the same trip.
