I have loved this place since first coming here and now come here quite often. There has been much activity in the last few months and is now much busier than the first time I visited. Some of the houses are now being lived in again and it looks like water and electricity are back in the town. Refurbishment and repair is also underway of what will become another historic site.
Jazirat Al Hamra, literally in Arabic “the red island”, the little deserted village south of Ras Al Khaimah town. The town was originally a tidal island and, by 1830, was home to some 200 people mostly occupied in pearl fishing. At the time, it was a dependency of Sharjah. It’s the ancestral home of the Zaabi family (or tribe) who left Ras Al Khaimah following an ongoing dispute in 1968 with the ruler and were given housing in Abu Dhabi by Sheikh Zayed. Some however stayed much closer moving to modern villas just a few hundred meters away in the new town. Its last Al-Zaab Sharif (mayor) was Hussein Bin Rahma Al-Zaabi, who is now the Sharif of Al-Zaab area in Abu Dhabi. His eldest son Rahma is the United Arab Emirates ambassador to Lebanon Living in Abu Dhabi, the family still retained title to their houses, which stand today in the middle of the huge Al Hamra tourism and leisure development, surrounded by big hotels, golf courses and man-made lagoons. It’s a sort of Freej moment, the little single-story houses surrounded by towering development.
For four decades, its buildings remained more or less intact. Visitors could walk along its crumbling walls and sandy alleyways and experience life in the UAE before the discovery of oil. Jazirat al Hamra found its preservation in isolation.
The village used to be an island but was filled in with the surrounding area in 1974
Jazirat al-Hamra is the southern most of the three main ports of Ras al-Khaimah. Because it was a pearling port, pearl merchants from the Al Bu Shamis tribe had a string of houses along the shore, merchant families from tribes based in southern Iran also maintained houses, and the edges of the village were inhabited seasonally by laborers and boat crews from the Habus and Shihuh peoples of the mountains, and the Bedu sections of the Al Khawatir, who used the southern desert of Ras al-Khaimah as grazing lands.
Jazirat Al Hamra is a delight to wander around, old style coral and adobe houses with their rooms all leading off a central courtyard, often with a henna tree at its centre. There’s an old mosque there, its minaret a dumpy little thing in which the muezzin would stand and sing out above the rooftops – but only just, it’s not very high.
The beach at Jazirat Al Hamra, now cut off from the village, used to be one of the few places where, after the first storm of the year, it was possible to find paper nautilus egg-cases, amazingly delicate little pieces of fractal beauty. The village is a little piece of the UAE’s history and heritage that hadn’t been tarted up, rebuilt, copied or otherwise ‘updated’.
Apparently everyone stayed away from Jazirat Al Hamra because of the djinn. Locals would tell spine-chilling stories, goading each other into a high state of fear and the young men who would stay overnight in the village as a dare. Across the Arab World people wear and own the blue talisman against the evil eye, nazar bonjouk in Turkish, part of a rich and deeply rooted belief in the supernatural around the region. Maybe the departing Zaabi would have seeded the rumour in their wake to ensure their village was left alone.
http://mideastposts.com/region/gcc/uae/the-uaes-ghost-town-jazirat-al-hamra-beware-the-djinn/
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/03/preserving-uae-village-frozen-time-20143992928828456.html