Al Ain
— — a green city held by aflaj older than the country.
Not only on a wall.
“The inland oasis city on the eastern edge of Abu Dhabi emirate, against the Omani border and the foot of Jebel Hafeet. Date palms run on for hectares inside the old town, watered by aflaj channels older than the country itself. Mornings smell of leaf litter and warm clay. The mountain road climbs to 1,200 metres in a series of switchbacks above the date groves.
Al Ain, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Al Ain is the second-largest city of Abu Dhabi emirate, set about 160 kilometres east of the capital and against the Omani border around the oasis town of Buraimi. The city holds roughly 770,000 people across a low-rise grid of districts and oases. It is sometimes called the Garden City for the density of palms and a local height rule that has long limited buildings on most plots. The Cultural Sites of Al Ain were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011, the first such inscription in the United Arab Emirates.
The oases run on aflaj, a gravity-fed irrigation system that taps the water table at the foot of the mountains and runs it through narrow stone channels to the date palms. Some aflaj here have been dated to the Iron Age, more than 3,000 years old. Al Ain Oasis alone holds around 147,000 date palms across roughly 1,200 hectares. The aflaj at Al Ain were inscribed by UNESCO in 2011 alongside the Bronze Age tombs at Hili and the nineteenth-century desert fort of Al Jahili.
Al Ain sits about 90 minutes by road from Abu Dhabi and just under two hours from Dubai. The Al Ain Oasis is free to walk and open through daylight hours. Al Jahili Fort, built in 1891 for the ruling Al Nahyan family, holds a permanent exhibition on the explorer Wilfred Thesiger inside its restored walls. Jebel Hafeet rises to 1,249 metres at the city's southern edge; the mountain road, opened in 1980, climbs to a viewpoint near the summit in around 25 minutes of driving.