In a place of superlatives —highest, biggest, priciest —why settle for simple pleasures? Dubai has long been seen as a fun-loving, unabashedly ambitious city, often overshadowing the UAE’s more seriousminded capital of Abu Dhabi. It’s a place where you can swim above clouds in 360-degree infinity pools or quaff cocktails in billowing beach cabanas, and it’s this ‘City of Gold’ most travellers come for. A winter sun utopia, it dazzles with opulence and novelty, from the soaring architecture and dancing fountains of Downtown to Jumeirah’s luxury hotels and the Marina’s million-pound yachts.
It may seem like it all rose fully formed, mirage-like, from the surrounding dunes; indeed, it only took a generation for this improbable desert metropolis to spring from the ground after the 1960s —a feat fuelled by new oil-funded wealth. But the city’s roots stretch deeper, and to far humbler beginnings.
Sipping chai from a street vendor’s vat and inhaling spices in a warren of souks: these are the joys of ‘Old Dubai’, in its northernmost reaches. In the 16th century, this once impoverished port became a pearl-trading hub and attracted a global diaspora aroundthe Arabic for ‘thank you’.
