A village in the sand
At the edge of the Sharjah desert, where the road is overtaken by the dunes that stretch toward Oman, lies a settlement slowly disappearing into the sand. Barely visible from the road, the village modestly lets you know it's there. Built in the late 1970s as a public housing project for members of the Al Ketbi tribe, it consisted of a single mosque and two tidy rows of concrete homes. It was part of a national push to modernize rural life, offering permanent structures to families who had long followed nomadic way of life. For a brief moment, it stood as a promise of permanence in the middle of the moving landscape. But the desert never stops moving.
Village entrance
From promise to abandonment
Only a few decades later the village was abandoned, without official explanation given. Some point to the obvious relentlessness of the surrounding sands, lack of water infrastructure, and isolation. Others cite the exciting pull of Dubai's and Sharjah's urban growth.
And then there are the stories. In local folklore, spirits known as djinn are blamed for unsettling homes, frightening and chasing residents from places where they don't belong. The village's silence and almost poetic decay lend themselves easily to myth, making it a material manifestation of a paused story, as if life there was interrupted mid-sentence.
There is no drama in its collapse, no wreckage, or disaster. Just abandonment. The quiet kind that happens when people decide a place is no longer worth resisting.
Front of an abandoned house
View of the village mosque
Garden entrance
Sand-filled houses
Abandoned houses
What remains
Today, the village sits in near-perfect ruin. Concrete walls still stand. Door and window frames remain, many intact, many broken. Inside, desert winds have pushed dunes through every opening. In some homes, rooms are sand-filled to the ceiling. In others, chipped tiles, faded paint and wallpaper hint at what once made these houses feel lived in.
Abandoned house exterior
House interior
