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City guide · United Arab Emirates
Dubai began as a pearling and fishing settlement on a saltwater creek, declared itself a free port in 1901, and dredged the creek longer in 1961; it has been adding ground ever since, with land reclamation producing more than 300 km of artificial coastline. Of the four million people living here in 2025, 92% are expatriates. Oil paid for the beginning and by 2018 accounted for under 1% of the emirate's output, which explains how deliberately the rest was built: the tallest building in the world at one end, the world's busiest international airport at 92 million passengers in 2024 at the other, and a long thin city strung between them.
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The Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve is a 225-square-kilometre protected area in the emirate's inland desert, which the reserve describes as 4.7 per cent of Dubai's total land area and as the UAE's first national park.
Source: OpenStreetMap contributors, Wikidata ·
District boundaries come from OSM administrative relations, so a district page holds exactly the places inside it — plus, for the islands and the coast, the nearest district by proximity.
Set your days, your pace and the hours you actually want to be out. The planner works around closing days and travel time, and leaves room to eat.
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