United Arab Emirates

United Arab Emirates: capital Abu Dhabi, population 11.5M, area 83,600 km². The 85th most populous country, in Asia. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

The United Arab Emirates occupies the eastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, seven emirates that declared their union on 2 December 1971. Long before that, the Umm Al Nar people sent copper to Sumer from a land those records call Magan, and pearl diving paid the coast's wages for centuries. Abu Dhabi and Dubai now hold the Burj Khalifa, Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, while the Hope probe the country built entered Mars orbit on 9 February 2021.

• Stone tools in layer C at Jebel Faya were dated by optical luminescence to about 125,000 years ago, evidence of a southern route out of Africa; UNESCO listed the site in 2025.
• The Umm Al Nar culture traded from about 2600 to 2000 BC as the land the Sumerians called Magan, sending them copper and diorite and passing on carnelian from the Indus valley.
• Six emirates declared their union on 2 December 1971, the day after British treaties were revoked, and Ras Al Khaimah joined them as the seventh on 10 February 1972.
• The Hope probe left Tanegashima on 20 July 2020 and entered Mars orbit on 9 February 2021, making the Emirates the fifth country to reach the planet and the first Arab one.

• Hazza Al Mansouri, once the youngest F-16 pilot in the Emirates, launched on Soyuz MS-15 on 25 September 2019 and spent eight days aboard the International Space Station.
• Sultan Al Neyadi flew a six-month mission with Expedition 69 in 2023, the longest Arab spaceflight, and became the first Arab astronaut to work outside the station on a spacewalk.
• Hassan Sharif, born in 1951, founded the Al Marijah Art Atelier and is called the father of conceptual art in the Gulf; Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou both hold his work.
• Adnan Al Talyani spent nineteen years at Al-Shaab and retired in 1997 with 161 caps and 56 goals; his late goals against China and South Korea took the Emirates to the 1990 World Cup.

• The Burj Khalifa reaches 828 metres at the roof, borrows its silhouette from the Great Mosque of Samarra, and reused structural steel salvaged from the demolished Palace of the Republic in East Berlin.
• The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque carries 82 domes and a hand-knotted carpet of 5,627 square metres with 2.27 billion knots; its lighting tracks the phases of the moon.
• Al Ain Oasis covers more than 1,200 hectares and holds over 147,000 date palms of a hundred varieties, watered by falaj channels that carry groundwater underground to the trees.
• Louvre Abu Dhabi rents the Louvre's name until 2047 under an agreement signed in March 2007, and its 8,000 square metres of galleries make it the largest art museum in the Arabian Peninsula.

• Gulf pearls were known to the Sumerians as fish eyes, and by the sixteenth century two to three thousand boats worked the beds; men in Julfar were paid in pearls rather than coin.
• Al Sadu, the Bedouin ground-loom weaving of geometric bands, went on UNESCO's urgent-safeguarding list for the Emirates in 2011 and moved to the representative list in 2025.
• The ghaf, a mesquite that survives extreme drought, is the national tree of the Emirates, and the Give a Ghaf campaign urges people to plant it against creeping desert.
• The Portuguese traveller Pedro Texeira thought his own word for pearl, aljofar, came from Al Julfar, the pearling port that stood where Ras Al Khaimah is now.

What is the capital of United Arab Emirates?

The capital of United Arab Emirates is Abu Dhabi.

What is the population of United Arab Emirates?

United Arab Emirates has about 11.5M people — the 85th most populous country in the world.

How big is United Arab Emirates?

United Arab Emirates covers 83,600 km², making it the 114th largest country by area.

Which region is United Arab Emirates in?

United Arab Emirates is in Western Asia, Asia.