Dalma Island

The ferry takes ninety minutes to raise a low green line of date palms and white walls out of the Gulf. Step ashore and the harbour still runs on working boats; the lanes behind it run on seven millennia of people who never stopped living here.

Dalma, thirty kilometres off Abu Dhabi's western coast, has been lived on longer than almost anywhere in the UAE: archaeological finds here run back more than 7,000 years and include Mesopotamian pottery and early farming tools, evidence that Gulf trade reached this island before the pyramids existed. Its later wealth was pearls. Bait Al Muraikhi, the 19th-century house of pearl merchant Mohammed bin Jasim Al Muraikhi, now holds the Delma Museum, and a trio of carefully preserved mosques stands near it. This is a working community, not a heritage set: fishing, farming and date cultivation still shape the days, dhows still race at the island's annual festival, and there are no hotels, so the crossing from Jebel Dhanna frames the visit as a long, unhurried day. Almost no foreign travellers make it out here, which is precisely the appeal.