Abu Dhabi for families

Must-see attractions

Abu Dhabi's must-see list reads differently from its neighbours'. The emirate built itself as a civic project — grand mosques, monuments, a planned cultural district on its own island — rather than as a marketed playground, and the result is a city whose headline attractions tend to be the size of small towns. This list is twelve of them, in rank order. The Sheikh Zayed Mosque anchors the spiritual register; a working circuit of Catholic churches (St. Joseph's, St. Therese, St. Francis, St. Paul's) carries the city's expat one. Saadiyat Island supplies the cultural set-piece, with the Guggenheim still a planned architectural structure and the Founder's Memorial supplying the civic counterweight. Wahat Al Karama carries the monument register. And the Ferrari World cluster — Formula Rossa among them — offers a different kind of attraction, built for sound and motion rather than silence. Read in order, the list moves from the spiritual to the civic to the kinetic. Skip nothing on it, but do not try to do it in a single day; the geography rewards two trips and a rented car. The locals do these on separate weekends, not on a single itinerary.