This ghost village near Dubai is now an unlikely tourist attraction

A tourist posing for a photo in front of a house buried under the sand at the Bedouin village of al-Ghuraifa. — Photos: AP

Nestled in sand dunes an hour’s drive from the skyscrapers of Dubai, a desert village abandoned in the 1990s stands as an eerie relic of the rapid urbanisation of the United Arab Emirates.

Built in the 1970s to house semi-nomadic Bedouin, the village of al-Ghuraifa was abandoned two decades later as oil wealth transformed the country into a global hub of commerce and tourism, home to the futuristic cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.