Abu Dhabi : Diary Entry

Chapter I : Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi feels like a mirage given permanence. Facing the Persian (Arabic) Gulf, Abu Dhabi seems like a dream forged from marble, light, and silence. In here everything is grand, rich, and endlessly white, as if the city had been polished by the sun itself. The warmth hangs in the air like in Seville, thick and golden, but here it carries no laughter, no music or dancing, no rush of voices spilling from shaded terraces. No flamenco. Instead, there is a serene stillness, a composure so deliberate it almost feels sacred.

The avenues stretch vast and empty, five, sometimes seven lanes wide, filled with white cars (mostly Asian) gliding soundlessly, their windows darkened like the eyes of a chinese woman, who prefers not to be seen. The tall buildings in the center, around Al Danah and Al Zahiyah, rise solemnly, recalling me of Baotou’s measured geometry, strong and unyielding. But on Abu Dhabi outskirts, the rhythm softens: low, sun-bleached houses, so like those scattered across Cádiz, rest quietly beneath a pale sky; streets laying silent, their gates half-open to the inside, suggesting the faint traces of human life. On them, a bicycle was left leaning against a wall, a chair was forgotten in the shade, a door slightly ajar as if the wind itself had entered. It feels as though life here has paused mid-breath, leaving behind traces of presence more powerful than the people themselves. Outside, the warmth trembles in the air - slow, golden, and dense - while the interiors offer a different world altogether - cool, still, and faintly humming with the whisper of air conditioning, an artificial winter sealed beneath the desert sun.

It is end of October and the temperature oscillates between 29º and 31º all throughout the day.

The ground floors of the towers shimmer with shops and cafés, bright and immaculate. The city’s abundance reveals itself not in chaos, but in quiet order, luxury curated rather than lived. Restaurants stay open late, glowing softly in the night, yet there is no music, no laughter, only the subdued cadence of conversation, the sigh of cooled air.

And at night, Abu Dhabi feels different from anywhere else I’ve been. It is calm, luminous, profoundly safe. You can walk for hours through empty streets or along the Corniche, under the pale light of the street lamps, without a trace of unease. Here, the night is open and unthreatening, as if the city itself were watching over you. It’s a comfort I rarely feel in London, where darkness always seems to hold a question.

The people, from every corner of Africa, Asia, Arabia, and beyond, carry with them a kind of patient grace. They move through the city arteries like threads in an intricate tapestry, woven together yet each following their own path. Now, I start to understand the intrinsics of centenary Arabic tapestry.

Abu Dhabi is a city both dazzling and distant, a place that seems to exist outside of time. It is neither hurried nor still, neither entirely real nor imagined. It does not invite you in; it simply is, radiant and untouchable, a monument to human ambition and restraint.

Chapter II : The Louvre, the Mosque and the Palace

The Louvre Abu Dhabi rises from the sea like something half-remembered and half-dreamed. From afar, with its constellation of white pavilions that are gathered beneath a vast dome of light, the Louvre seems to float, weightless, as though the horizon itself had chosen to rest upon the water. The air outside quivers with heat, but upon crossing the threshold, the world changes: the temperature cools, the air hums softly, and time begins to loosen its grip.

Inside, I am welcomed by a familiar figure. An ancient Olmec head. The Pre-Columbian sculpture illustrates the history of art, from Mexico, through its archeology, as a way to reinvent a universal narrative. Moving ahead, the first galleries feel like an overture, a quiet beginning before the great chorus of civilisations. One installation, in particular, holds the visitor still and gives its clues: a collection of glass boxes in different shapes and sizes, each containing fragments of ancient life: pottery shards, tools, idols, bones, and ornaments from the different corners of the world and from different times. The glass boxes are scattered across the room, each glowing faintly under their own light, as if the objects within still carried a memory imprinted by fire. From a distance, those objects seem to speak and respond to one another, whispering across the gaps of centuries: a biface Neanderthal hand axe (500 000 b.c., Indre-et Loire, France) listening to a large dish with interlaced motifs from Venice (16th Century, Italy), a commemorative Head of Oba, from the Ancient Kingdom of Benin (19th Century), answering an Indian Ewer from India (16th to 18th Century). They are separated by space, by culture, by millennia. Yet they feel close, almost intimate, bound by the close, almost intimate, enduring human act of making. The room itself becomes a dialogue, a quiet reminder that civilisations never truly vanish: they echo, they reply, they remain.

From that point onward, the museum unfolds like a single, continuous sentence: the First Villages, the First Great Powers, Civilisations and Empires, Silk Roads, World Empires, Multiple Modernities, amongst other paragraphs in a long essay. The Louvre Abu Dhabi does not organise by nation or empire; it arranges human history as one shared narrative, showing how ideas and forms migrate like winds. A Mesopotamian votive figure, its gaze fixed in eternal prayer, stands beside an Egyptian funerary mask, both witnesses to the birth of faith. A Cycladic idol shares the same space with an Islamic astrolabe, each searching for order amid the unknown.

Further in, Jusepe de Ribera's Saint Joseph (1647) meets a Qur’anic manuscript in Kufic calligraphy (1370-1507), one celebrating divine light through the face of a man, the other through the rhythm of words. Across from them, Fragonard’s Les marionnettes (1775-1778) and a Persian miniature of a royal court offer two ways of approaching the sacred: one through tenderness and women form, the other through geometry and colour. In their contrast lies a quiet revelation: the European gaze turned outward, seeking divinity in flesh and story; the Arab gaze turned inward, finding it in abstraction, pattern, and the infinite repetition of grace. Somewhere else, Toyokuni’s The Courtesan Hinatsuru of the Choji-ya House (1793-1797) seems to converse with a West African face mask (19th to 20th century), both ceremonial, both bold: kindred spirits separated by geography but joined by intuition. Elsewhere, a Byzantine icon gleams across from a Bodhisattva from Gandhara, each a mirror to the other’s serenity, while capturing the ungraspable.

In every room, the dialogue continues. Civilisations calling out to one another across time, misunderstanding and understanding in equal measure. The Louvre Abu Dhabi doesn’t just exhibit art; it stages a conversation that feels older than history itself. It becomes, in its essence, a monument to tolerance, to the idea that beauty has never belonged to one faith, one tongue, or one people.

The architecture deepens the message. The dome above - vast, intricate, a tortoise shell woven of steel and shadow - filters sunlight into soft, shifting patterns that ripple like reflections on water. Beneath it, the museum breathes a rhythm of light and stillness. The sea laps at its edge, dissolving the boundaries between foundation and reflection, earth and sky. A tortoise emerges.

On the other side of the city, not far away, the Grand Mosque stands radiant and serene. The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque is a vision of white marble and blue water, its mirror-like floors reflecting the heavens, its golden leaves glinting under the sun. When the call to prayer drifts across the city, it feels less like a command than a sigh; a sound that gathers everything, even silence, into devotion.

Together, the Louvre and the Grand Mosque form Abu Dhabi’s twin spirits: art and faith, each luminous in its own stillness. One gathers the stories of humankind; the other gathers the hearts of the faithful. Perpendicular to those two sites stand the Presidential Palace.

Seen in the hard glare of midday, the Presidential Palace Qasr Al Watan takes on a different character. Like a wine left open too long, its richness turns sharp, its sweetness fading into something austere. The marble no longer glows; it glares, reflecting the sun with a force that feels almost defensive. The air is dense with heat and silence, each echo swallowed by the enormity of space. Inside, beneath the chandeliers and gilded domes, beauty ferments into spectacle - a grandeur that overwhelms rather than moves. While from the outside water fountains murmur with rehearsed precision, as if even water were required to obey formality.

In that unflinching light, Qasr Al Watan reveals its essence: a vintage crafted for display, not for taste: flawless in appearance, but lacking the quiet imperfections that makes something human. It is power decanted, polished, and poured until all that remains is the shine of authority - intoxicating, perhaps, but ultimately without the warmth of a mother's womb.

Together, the Louvre, the Mosque, and the Palace form a trinity that defines Abu Dhabi: art, faith, and authority. The three pillars holding the city aloft. But while the first two draw their strength from light and openness, the third seems carved from shadow and certainty. Standing between them, one feels the balance, but also the tension. Abu Dhabi aspires not only to eternity, but to control over how eternity is seen. And perhaps that is its most human quality of all.

Chapter III : the 'hidden geometry'

Abu Dhabi reveals itself, in my mind, as a vast and deliberate square. This is a city arranged not by accident, but by intention, almost as though drawn with a ruler on a sheet of bright white paper. Each vertex holds a different spirit, a different promise, a different way of understanding what this place wants to be.

On the northern point, on the Saadiyat Island, facing the open light of the Persian (Arabic) Gulf, lies the cultural quarter: the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the (upcoming) Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the slow and steady breathing of ideas. Opposite it, to the south, stands the realm of faith. The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque rises in calm splendour, its white domes soft against the sky, its reflections trembling in the water like a prayer whispered twice. To the west, occupying its own axis of grandeur, stands the Presidential Palace Qasr Al Watan. In the geometry of the city, this vertex represents power - ceremonial, polished, unyielding. Finally, on the eastern vertex, the city sheds its solemnity and turns towards another spectacle. That of entertainment: the malls, the marina, the Formula 1 circuit, the Yas artificial islands are designed for leisure, for play, for glittering consumer dreams.

Framing this square, nature itself draws a final boundary. To the north-west, the water, warm, calm and blue-green, laps against the edges of the cultural district; a reminder of the trade routes and migrations that once defined life here. To the south-east, the desert stretches into infinity; a silent reminder of origins, of a time before glass towers and climate-controlled air. Water and sand, culture and faith, power and pleasure, each edge of the square stitching together a city that lives between extremes yet rarely shows the stitching.

Standing between those four marks of human tensions, in that hidden geometry, Abu Dhabi becomes not just a place, but a diagram of its own ambitions, a square of shining certainties set between the fluidity of the sea and the timeless hush of the desert, a window on the infinite.

Abu Dhabi, October 2025

© Rui Gonçalves Cepeda