Jebel Hafeet

The mountain stands alone, a single tooth of pale limestone rising out of the gravel plain, and the road up it barely straightens for ten kilometres. Every sweeper opens a wider slice of Al Ain's palm grid; at the bottom, warm spring water steams into open pools.

Jebel Hafit is Abu Dhabi's highest mountain, and its summit road, built in 1980, has been called a contender for the greatest driving road in the world: sixty corners from tight hairpins to fast sweepers, climbing more than 700 vertical metres on flawless tarmac. The deeper draw sits at its feet. More than 500 tombs from the Hafit period, around 5,000 years old, scatter the foothills, single chambers of rough local stone that each held two to five of the Bronze Age dead; Danish archaeologists opening them in 1959 found ceramics and copper that proved long-distance trade was already running through this corner of Arabia. The tombs helped earn Al Ain its 2011 UNESCO World Heritage inscription, the country's first, and guided hikes, camel rides and Bedouin-style camps thread Jebel Hafit Desert Park among them. At Green Mubazzarah, thermal springs off the mountain fill pools beside free public lawns where half of Al Ain seems to picnic on winter evenings.