Al Ain

Al Ain and Buraimi, now divided by an international border, are two halves of an oasis cluster settled for at least five thousand years. Round stone tombs on the slopes of Jebel Hafeet gave their name to the Hafit period of the third millennium BC, and at Hili, north of the modern centre, archaeologists found a Bronze Age settlement with a large circular tomb and one of the earliest known falaj irrigation systems in the world — underground channels tapping the water table and carrying it by gravity to the date gardens. The oases supported farming and a stop on the caravan routes between the coast and inland Arabia long before oil.

Control of the oases was contested for centuries between the Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, their neighbours and the rulers of Oman and, in the twentieth century, Saudi Arabia, whose forces occupied part of Buraimi in 1952 and were removed by agreement and by force in the following years. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan spent his formative years here and served as the ruler's representative in the Eastern Region from 1946 to 1966, building schools, rebuilding forts and reorganising the falaj water shares before becoming ruler of Abu Dhabi and then president of the federation formed in 1971.

Oil money turned a scatter of villages into a planned city of wide roads, roundabouts and mandated low buildings, with the country's first museum in 1969, a zoo, a university in 1976 and heavy tree planting that earned it the name of the Garden City. In 2011 the oases, Hili, Bidaa Bint Saud and the Jebel Hafeet tombs together became the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in the United Arab Emirates.

Al Ain has a larger share of Emirati citizens than the coastal cities, and the character follows from that: quieter streets, family compounds, a strong attachment to the oases and to the tribal history of the Eastern Region. Poetry evenings, falconry, camel racing on the track outside the city and a busy calendar of majlis gatherings all sit closer to the surface here than in Dubai.

The city is also a university town. The United Arab Emirates University, founded in 1976, is the country's oldest, and its campus gives Al Ain a student population and a research life that shape the professional workforce nationally. Al Ain FC, the most successful football club in the country, draws large crowds to Hazza bin Zayed Stadium, and match nights are among the few times the centre feels crowded.

Manners are more formal than on the coast. Modest dress is normal rather than requested, greetings are longer, and coffee and dates are offered to visitors as a matter of course. Heritage is treated as living rather than displayed: the falaj channels still water the date gardens, families still own plots in the oases, and the forts are used for exhibitions, poetry and Ramadan events rather than left as monuments.

About 850,000 people live in the city and its surrounding district, making it the largest inland city in the country and the fourth-largest overall, after Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. Emiratis form a much higher proportion of the population than in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, alongside a large workforce from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt and the Philippines who run the shops, farms, construction sites and cafeterias.

Government service, the university and the wider education and health sectors are the main employers, together with agriculture — dates, fodder, vegetables and plant nurseries on the irrigated land around the city — and a growing logistics and light-industrial zone. Building heights are capped, so the city spreads outwards in villa districts rather than upwards, and the distances involved make almost every household dependent on a car.

The day begins early and pauses in the heat; evenings fill the parks, the lawns around Al Jahili Fort and the Green Mubazzarah lakes with families and barbecues. The working week runs Monday to Friday, with the weekend starting Friday afternoon. Water is the city's long-running concern: the falaj system depends on groundwater that has been drawn down heavily, and much of the modern supply now comes from desalinated water piped inland from the coast.

Al Ain's food is closer to Emirati home cooking than the international scenes of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Machboos — rice cooked with meat, chicken or fish, dried lime, cinnamon and cardamom — is the standard festive dish; thareed layers thin regag bread under a meat and vegetable stew; and harees, wheat and meat beaten together for hours, appears at Ramadan and weddings. Goat and lamb cooked slowly in an underground oven, madfoon or mandi style depending on the cook, is served at large gatherings.

Dates are the city's own product. The oases grow many varieties, and the souq sells them fresh and soft as rutab in high summer and dried for the rest of the year, along with date syrup, honey from mountain hives and local limes. Gahwa, pale cardamom coffee poured from a long-spouted dallah, is drunk with dates at any hour, and camel milk, produced on farms around the city, is sold plain and in flavoured bottles.

Everyday eating is South Asian and Levantine. Cafeterias serve biryani, karak tea and fresh parathas; Lebanese and Syrian grills do shawarma, hummus and mixed grills; Filipino and Egyptian places feed their own communities. Luqaimat, small fried dough balls in date syrup, are the usual sweet, sold at markets and Ramadan stalls.