Yas Island

I went to Yas Island expecting to feel a little cynical about it, the way I sometimes do about purpose-built entertainment districts, and left having genuinely enjoyed myself more than I wanted to admit to the friend who’d talked me into going. He’d grown up partly in Abu Dhabi and treated Yas the way I treat certain beaches back home — not sophisticated, not the “real” city, but exactly where you go when you want a weekend that doesn’t require any cultural seriousness at all.

An island built entirely for leisure

Yas Island sits just off the Abu Dhabi mainland, connected by a handful of bridges, and unlike almost everywhere else in the capital it was conceived from the start as a single-purpose leisure destination rather than a mixed residential or business district. The result is a strange, honest concentration: Ferrari World’s massive red roof, shaped like the outline of a Ferrari GT body and visible from the highway long before you arrive, sits a short walk from Yas Waterworld’s slides and wave pools, which sit a short walk from the Yas Marina Circuit, the floodlit Formula 1 track that hosts the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix every year. Nothing on the island pretends to be anything other than entertainment.

Inside Ferrari World, I rode Formula Rossa, still one of the fastest roller coasters on earth, and stood afterward slightly stunned in the queue line while a group of teenagers behind me immediately asked to go again. What I hadn’t expected was how much of the park is given over to actual Ferrari heritage — engine displays, driver memorabilia, a recreation of a Maranello workshop — enough that even someone with no particular interest in the brand, which described me accurately, came away understanding something about Enzo Ferrari’s original obsession with speed as a form of engineering purity.

Where the Grand Prix comes to life

The most interesting hour of the day for me was walking a public section of the Yas Marina Circuit itself, outside race weekend, when it’s eerily empty — a smooth ribbon of asphalt curving past the Yas Viceroy hotel, which famously straddles the track with a glowing LED facade that changes color on race nights. My friend, who’d been to a Grand Prix here, described the specific electricity of watching F1 cars scream past at night under the hotel’s lights, the whole island turned into a single stadium for one weekend a year, hotel rooms booked a year in advance and beach clubs converted into viewing parties.

We ended the day at Yas Waterworld, which turned out to be the best decision of the trip — a genuinely well-designed water park with a storyline running through its rides about a lost pearl, which sounds gimmicky and somehow wasn’t. I left Yas Island sunburnt, slightly nauseous from the coaster, and completely won over.

When to go: November for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix if you want the full spectacle, though it requires booking hotels and tickets well in advance; October through April otherwise for comfortable weather at the theme parks, since summer heat makes daytime outdoor rides miserable.