Liwa International Festival 2027 schedule and lineup
Liwa International Festival 2027 runs from December 11th to January 2nd across the UAE’s tallest dune. The lineup is genuinely something else.
You are standing at the base of a sand dune rising over 300 metres. The sun sets behind the Al Dhafra skyline, tinting the Liwa desert amber. A car climbs a near-vertical wall of sand at full throttle. Additionally, fifteen extreme athletes launch from ramps at high speeds.
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This is not a fever dream. This is Liwa International Festival 2027, and it runs from December 11th, 2026, to January 2nd, 2027.
Twenty-Five Years and Still Getting Better
The Liwa International Festival has been running since 2001. That is twenty-five years of desert motorsport, Emirati heritage celebrations, family entertainment and the peculiar kind of joy that comes from spending a day in one of the most dramatic natural landscapes on earth surrounded by people who are also having the time of their lives.
The numbers from last year tell the story of how far it has come. More than 700,000 visitors over 23 days. The Best Festival of the Year award at the Middle East Events Awards 2026. A programme so broad it genuinely requires planning in advance to avoid missing something worth seeing.
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The 2027 edition arrives with the ambition of surpassing all of that.
Organised by the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi in collaboration with Liwa Sports Club, Abu Dhabi Heritage Authority, Abu Dhabi Police, Abu Dhabi Media Network, Abu Dhabi Sports Council, Al Dhafra Municipality and Al Dhafra Hospitals, the festival takes place under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Ruler’s Representative in Al Dhafra Region, centred around Tal Moreeb, the UAE’s highest sand dune at over 300 metres and one of the most recognisable natural landmarks in the country.
Nitro Circus Is Coming to the Desert
If you are going to add one thing to a festival that already had everything, making it the thing that involves fifteen elite extreme sports athletes performing freestyle motocross jumps, BMX stunts, pyrotechnics and choreographed routines across three shows is a reasonable choice.
Nitro Circus makes its Liwa debut on December 19th and 20th, 2026. The internationally acclaimed show has toured stadiums across the world with a format built around the philosophy that the only limit to what a human being can do on a motorcycle or a bicycle is the human being’s willingness to find out.
Three performances. Flaming obstacles. Synchronised aerial sequences. Special effects designed to make the desert backdrop feel even more cinematic than it already is.
For context, Nitro Circus has performed in over 30 countries. Liwa will be its most dramatically staged venue yet.
Liwa Village Is Back and Half of It Is New
Liwa Village sits at the emotional heart of the festival, and the 2027 edition arrives with more than half of its rides and attractions either brand new or completely reimagined.
New additions include the Circus Swinger, Tagada and Space Tower for those whose idea of relaxation involves height and centrifugal force. Ninja Challenge, Pixel Run, Desert Heist and Drift Trike join the roster. The Bungee Jump makes its Liwa debut. Target Shooting and Climb Quest complete a list of new experiences that should keep visitors occupied across multiple visits rather than a single afternoon.
Returning attractions include the Ferris Wheel, Bumper Cars, Slingshot, Booster, Classic Cars, Go Water Kart, Mini Tank Paint Ball, House of Horror, Maze Adventure and the legendary 4×4 Track a fixture at Liwa for years and one that generates the kind of queue that tells you everything you need to know about its popularity.
The Motorsport Calendar Is Its Own Three-Week Event
For the audience that comes specifically for the desert sport competitions, the 2027 programme is structured across nearly the entire festival duration with a different discipline almost every day.
December 11th and 12th bring the Freestyle Display, setting the tone from the opening weekend. December 13th is Motorbike Drag Race. Falcon Racing runs from December 14th to 16th. Sand Freestyle Display returns December 18th and 19th. The Liwa UTV Track runs December 20th. Traditional Pigeon Racing takes December 22nd and 23rd. The Liwa Burnout Challenge occupies Christmas Eve. Liwa Drift fills December 25th and 26th.
And then the grand finale. The Tal Moreeb Car Championship, the event that has defined the festival’s identity for over two decades, runs from December 30th through January 2nd. Cars attempting to climb the UAE’s tallest dune competitively is not something that needs embellishment to sound extraordinary. It simply is.
Heritage That Goes Deeper Than a Display
Liwa’s cultural programme has always been one of the festival’s least-shouted-about qualities and one of its most genuinely meaningful.
The Heritage Village, presented by Abu Dhabi Heritage Authority and inspired by a traditional Emirati fareej or neighbourhood, returns with demonstrations and hands-on experiences covering the everyday life, customs and practices of previous generations. It is designed for families and younger visitors in particular, the generation that is growing up in a UAE that has changed faster than anywhere else on earth, and for whom connection to what came before requires active, deliberate cultivation.
The House of Poetry and Poets celebrates Nabati poetry, one of the most distinctive and enduring literary traditions in the Arab world, through live sessions that explore its role in expressing community values and lived experience. The Falconry Tent offers live displays covering the full practice of falconry from bird training to traditional equipment, with workshops for young visitors to make model falcon hoods.
The Emirati Majlis experience teaches the customs of traditional social gathering: how to enter, how to greet, how to sit, how to welcome a guest and what it means to extend genuine hospitality. The live Gahwa workshop teaches the preparation and serving traditions of Emirati coffee in a way that makes clear it has never been simply about the drink.
Beyond the main site, the festival extends into the broader Al Dhafra Region across Dhafeer Fort, Al Meel Fort, Al Yabana Fort, Khanour Fort and Mezairaa Fort each offering its own layer of heritage, retail, dining and cultural programming.
The App, the Camping and the Practical Details
The 2027 edition introduces the festival’s first official app, through which visitors can explore the event calendar, book camping spots and RV parking spaces, and find commercial participation opportunities.
The camping dimension of Liwa is worth noting on its own terms. Spending a night in the Al Dhafra desert during festival season, with the dunes lit by starlight and the temperature finally at the kind of level that makes sleeping outside genuinely pleasant, is an experience that belongs in a different category from day-visit entertainment. The app makes booking that experience straightforward rather than complicated.
Liwa International Festival 2027. December 11th to January 2nd. The UAE’s most dramatic natural setting. Twenty-five years of accumulated excellence. Nitro Circus making its desert debut.
Plan accordingly.
