Sunday · September · 20 · 2026
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
— Mark Twain
Sun & daylight
The sun rises at 06:11 and sets at 18:23 in Abu Dhabi today, giving 12h 11m of daylight. Solar noon is at 12:17.
06:11
Sunrise
12:17
Noon
18:23
Sunset
Midnight
00:17
Sunrise
06:11
Solar noon
12:17
Sunset
18:23
Solar midnight
00:17
Daylight
12h 11m
Daylight runs about 13h 39m around the June solstice and 10h 37m around the December solstice.
Daylight saving time
Abu Dhabi does not observe daylight saving time. Clocks stay on UTC+4 all year, so the local time never shifts with the seasons.
Public holidays
United Arab Emirates has no public holidays in September 2026.
Architecture
Abu Dhabi has spent its oil on architecture faster than almost anywhere, clearing sites on Saadiyat island and along the Corniche for buildings by the biggest names available. The question every one of them answers is what a Gulf modernism should look like.
Completed 2023
David Adjaye
An interfaith complex on Saadiyat island, holding a mosque, a church and a synagogue as three separate buildings of equal size on one raised platform. Adjaye gave each the same cube but a different structure — the mosque's screens, the church's vertical fins, the synagogue's palm-frond canopy — so no faith is ranked above another. A shared garden connects the three. It is a diplomatic idea built as architecture, and it holds together because the geometry is even-handed.
Completed 2017
Jean Nouvel
A museum on Saadiyat island, built as a low cluster of white galleries under one vast shallow dome. Nouvel wove the dome from eight layers of steel stars so that sunlight falls through it in shifting points he called a rain of light, an effect taken from the woven palm roofs of the old souk. The galleries sit half in the sea, cooled by the water around them. It lends a French museum's name to a building that argues the light belongs to the Gulf.
Completed 2012
Aedas
A pair of office towers whose most-photographed feature is the screen that moves. Aedas hung two thousand triangular shades two metres off the glass and drove them by computer to open and close with the sun, a mashrabiya rebuilt as a machine that cuts the heat gain by more than half. The pattern reshapes the towers through the day. It is the clearest case in the city of a traditional device solving a modern problem at full scale.
Completed 2011
RMJM
An office tower beside the exhibition centre, built to lean eighteen degrees, more than four times the tilt of the tower at Pisa. RMJM stacked the floors with a small horizontal shift at each level so the whole shaft curves as it rises, then anchored it against the overhang on nearly five hundred piles driven thirty metres down. A steel diagrid carries the lean. It was engineered to be recognised from a distance, which for a building by a convention centre is the job.
Completed 2007
Yusef Abdelki
The national mosque, and the largest in the country, built in white marble at the edge of the city. Abdelki drew Mughal, Moorish and Ottoman sources together into eighty-two domes and a thousand columns inlaid with floral marquetry in coloured stone, and laid the world's largest hand-knotted carpet across the main hall. It holds tens of thousands and is open to visitors of every faith. It was Sheikh Zayed's own commission and his burial place, built to stand for the country as a whole.