Nineteen Seventy Nine: Le Meridien Abu Dhabi Resort and Its Gardens

The Captain’s Arms is a pub in a garden, which is not a sentence that applies to many buildings in the Gulf. It has pool tables, screens showing whatever is being played that night, and a terrace set under trees that were planted before most of the surrounding district existed. On an evening in January it is one of the more agreeable places to sit in Abu Dhabi, and it has been serving that purpose for longer than a good number of the capital’s hotels have been standing.

Around it, Le Meridien Abu Dhabi Resort runs three further named venues: Latest Recipe, the all day dining room with its buffet and terrace; Al Finjan, the lobby lounge and coffee house; and Moon Deck Lounge and Bar at the poolside. It is a shorter list than the hotels nearby keep, and the breakfast at Latest Recipe is the meal guests single out most often after the beach itself.

A hotel that opened in 1979

The resort opened in 1979 and was inaugurated by Sheikh Zayed alongside Queen Elizabeth II, whose state visit to the Emirates fell that February. The lobby still carries photographs of receptions held here in those years, and guests stop at them.

Abu Dhabi is a city built almost entirely within living memory, so a hotel with a documented past occupies a particular place in it. This one was receiving heads of state while a large part of the island around it was still sand.

The date matters commercially as well as sentimentally. A 1979 opening means the resort took its land when land on this shore was available in quantity, and the result is a footprint no operator could assemble in Al Zahiyah today at any price. Everything that follows in this article, the gardens, the pitch, the two hundred metres of beach, descends from that one fact.

Twenty thousand square metres of garden

Marriott puts the landscaped grounds at more than twenty thousand square metres, and that figure is the property’s real asset. Trees of this size cannot be bought, only waited for, and no resort opening in the emirate this decade will have anything comparable for another forty years.

The buildings are low rise, spread through the planting rather than stacked above it, which means a great many rooms open more or less directly onto the grounds. The private beach runs to two hundred metres at the water’s edge. The resort sits in Al Zahiyah, two minutes on foot from Abu Dhabi Mall and around a quarter of an hour from the Corniche, with Zayed International Airport at 34 kilometres and Al Maryah Island and its financial district close by across the channel.

The rooms

Categories run from deluxe rooms with city or garden outlooks through to sea view rooms and suites. Room sizes are modest measured against the newer resorts on the outer islands, and that is the honest trade for the address and the age of the building.

What the low rise arrangement gives back is proximity. A garden room here puts the lawn outside the door rather than eighteen floors below it, and guests consistently report the rooms as clean, spacious and well maintained. The property has been kept in considerably better order than its year of opening would lead anyone to expect.

> The Captain’s Arms in January, under mature trees, with the city held at a distance, is a very particular Abu Dhabi pleasure, and it is one the newer hotels have no way to manufacture.

The beach, the pools and the football pitch

The private beach carries umbrellas, loungers and towels along its two hundred metres. There is more than one outdoor pool, including a dedicated children’s pool, and cabanas at the main pool come at no charge, which several Corniche properties treat as a paid extra.

The sporting provision is where this resort separates itself from every city hotel in the capital. There is a full size outdoor football pitch built to international standards, outdoor tennis courts, indoor squash courts and a fitness centre with a boxing ring in it. That is a school of facilities rather than a hotel gymnasium, and it exists because the site is large enough to hold it.

Spa and hammam

The spa treats physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing as parts of the same brief, and a traditional Moroccan hammam sits at the centre of the offer. A hammam is a different proposition from a treatment room, requiring heat, water, black soap and time, and it rewards booking a long slot rather than an hour squeezed between other things.

It also pairs unusually well with the rest of the site. An hour in the hammam after an hour on the tennis court, followed by lunch on the terrace at Latest Recipe and an afternoon on the sand, is a day that most city hotels in the capital simply cannot assemble within their own boundaries.

Meetings, weddings and families

Named meeting rooms include Al Maryah and Al Reem, and the banquet spaces take corporate groups and weddings. The gardens make the wedding business here a genuinely different product from a ballroom in a tower.

For families the calculation is simple. Children get grass, a pitch, a pool of their own and two hundred metres of beach, and the largest shopping centre on this side of the island is a two minute walk from the gate.

Set against its neighbour

Beach Rotana is ten minutes along the same shore and the two properties answer different questions. Beach Rotana offers twelve restaurants and bars and a mall attached to the building. Le Meridien offers twenty thousand square metres of garden, a football pitch, a two hundred metre beach and a lobby wall of photographs from 1979. A visitor here to eat and shop should take the first. A visitor who wants trees, space and a beach at a central address should take the second, and will pay noticeably less for a beach stay this close to the middle of the city.

Contact

HOTEL: Le Meridien Abu Dhabi Resort
ADDRESS: Al Zahiyah E14, Abu Dhabi
TELEPHONE: +971 2 644 6666
EMAIL: 01899.FBReservations@adnhmc.com
WEBSITE: https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/auhmd-le-meridien-abu-dhabi/overview/
AREA: Al Zahiyah