Sharjah

The old city has been restored rather than replaced, and the result is the largest heritage area in the country — a compact grid of coral-and-gypsum courtyard buildings, wind towers and shaded alleys around the creek, now holding galleries, cafés and a run of museums within walking distance of one another. The Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation is the anchor and is genuinely first-rate, covering science, astronomy, manuscripts and craft across the Islamic world rather than serving as a religious display. The Sharjah Art Museum and the contemporary spaces run by the emirate's art foundation carry serious international programming, and the Sharjah Art Foundation's biennial has real standing in the art world. Around them sit smaller, more specific collections — calligraphy, maritime history, archaeology, classic cars — and the restored Al Hisn fort at the centre. It is a lot of museum for one emirate, and that is the point: the density is deliberate policy, and the UNESCO City of Literature designation and the annual book fair belong to the same long strategy. A single unhurried day covers the highlights on foot.

Sharjah does not serve or sell alcohol anywhere — not in hotels, not in restaurants, not in shops. This is the practical difference between it and its neighbours that most affects a trip, and it is worth deciding about deliberately rather than discovering. For a day visit it changes nothing: you come for museums and leave for dinner. For a stay it changes the evening entirely, and the emirate's hotels are correspondingly cheaper and quieter than equivalent properties twenty minutes away. Which side of that trade you want depends on the trip. Dress expectations are also somewhat more conservative here than in Dubai or Abu Dhabi — shoulders and knees covered is the norm rather than the courtesy — and it is a good idea to dress for the emirate you are in rather than the one you slept in. How alcohol licensing varies across the country is set out in the UAE food guide.

Behind the coastal city the emirate runs inland into desert and low rocky hills, and the significant site there is an archaeological area where excavation has turned up settlement, tombs and fossil beds spanning from prehistory through the Bronze and Iron Ages — some of the oldest human evidence in the peninsula, presented in a purpose-built visitor centre. It is a genuinely unexpected thing to find in this country, and it sits alongside a landscape of desert, rock outcrops and dune fields used for stargazing, dune-driving and, in a curious modern layer, for cycling and running events on closed desert roads. This inland belt is also where Sharjah's desert-camp accommodation sits, quieter and less commercial than the Dubai equivalents; how those differ, and how to pick between an operator and a reserve, is covered in the UAE desert guide.

The fact almost no visitor knows: Sharjah owns three separate pieces of territory on the far side of the Hajar Mountains, on the Gulf of Oman. Khor Fakkan is the largest — a natural deep-water bay ringed by mountains, with a corniche, a sizeable beach and a waterfall built into the rock above the town — and Kalba to its south holds one of the oldest mangrove forests in Arabia, a bird reserve and a much slower pace. The water on this coast is a different proposition from the Gulf side: deeper, cooler, clearer, with living coral and the country's best snorkelling directly off the beaches. The drive from Sharjah city takes about ninety minutes through a mountain road that is itself the best scenery in the northern emirates. It makes an excellent day trip and an even better overnight, and it is the single strongest reason to think of Sharjah as more than a museum stop.