Liwa sits at the northern edge of the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, two and a half hours inland from Abu Dhabi, and its festival belongs to that landscape: hill-climb and drag races up the Tal Moreeb dune, camel beauty judging, falconry, saluki racing and date competitions.
No attendance figure is collected in this pass.
The events are Emirati rather than expatriate in audience, which makes this one of the few entries on the UAE calendar where a visitor is a guest at somebody else's festival rather than the intended customer.
The season is the interior's short cool window. By March the Liwa crescent is already too hot for the programme, and the whole Al Dhafra festival calendar — this and the camel festival that follows — runs between December and February for that reason.
PlanningA window at the turn of the year, in the desert interior rather than on the coast.
Dates
Season
Computed from the recurrence rule we record for this entry, not copied from a listing. A date marked ~ comes from a calendar conversion and the observance may fall a day or two either side.