The oases come up again at the Traditional Handicrafts Festival, which runs at Souq Al Qattara from 23 October to 11 November 2026. An exhibition called Al Maqith Trail traces the journeys people made by caravan from the coast to the oases in the hottest part of the summer. Then there’s a connection to the palms you can taste. At the festival’s Bakhar Al Bait cooking workshops, the programme includes making date syrup, pickling dried limes and mixing bezaar, an Emirati spice blend.

The souq once brought together merchants, craftspeople, poets and storytellers. During the festival, local family businesses and young entrepreneurs set up stalls alongside the workshops and demonstrations. The fashion pavilion gets into the details of Emirati dress, from tailoring to the decorative braiding known as talli. And at the pottery workshops, you can try shaping clay yourself, which is a good way to appreciate how easy a practised pair of hands makes it look.

One of the less obvious crafts on the programme is door-making. Biban Mal Awal looks at how traditional wooden doors were made. A door is the sort of thing you might walk straight past in a historic house. Once you have spent a little time thinking about how it was put together, you might find yourself looking at the next one more closely.

Above the gardens in Al Qattara stands the mudbrick tower of Bin Ati Al Darmaki House. Al Qattara Arts Centre opened around the former residence in 2011, with an exhibition hall in the northern courtyard and workshops to the west of the tower. The centre offers classes in calligraphy, oil painting and oud, as well as wheel-thrown pottery.

Pottery feels particularly at home here. Archaeologists found pottery at the site, and today you can come here to make your own. It’s a funny thing to think about while you are trying to get a lump of clay to do what you want. People in this part of Al Ain were making pots long before anyone put a pottery class on the calendar.

In the courtyard of Qasr Al Muwaiji, a glass-walled pavilion tells the story of the fort through the life of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who was born here. His father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, used the fort as both a family home and a diwan, where he conducted government affairs. The fort was a gathering place for the wider community, too. As its mosque grew, more people came to pray, meet and celebrate.

Bait Mohammed bin Khalifa takes you into another chapter of the city’s history. The house was built in 1958, when oil exploration and discovery were changing life in the emirate. Its permanent exhibition looks at what that meant for the way people lived and built their homes in the 1950s and 1960s. The house had long been a gathering point in the neighbourhood. Since reopening as a community centre in 2021, it’s become somewhere people can drop in again.

There’s another reason to go to Qasr Al Muwaiji on a Wednesday morning in November. As part of Heritage in the Making — A Shimmering Heritage, artisans demonstrate how they braid talli, the decorative trim you might spot on the cuffs of an Emirati dress. You can also catch the demonstrations on Mondays at Al Qattara Arts Centre and on Tuesdays at Al Jahili Fort. They run from 9 am to noon throughout November, with no booking required. So even after the festival ends, you can spend part of a morning finding out who lived at the fort and part of it watching how the threads on a sleeve come together.