Dubai

The largest city of the United Arab Emirates, a trading port on a tidal creek that became a city of record-breaking towers within a single lifetime. The layers survive if you walk them: the coral-and-gypsum lanes and wind towers of the old Al Fahidi quarter on the Bur Dubai bank, where the town began; across the Creek in Deira, the gold, spice and perfume souks and the wooden dhows still loaded by hand along the water; and in Downtown, the deliberate vertical city built at once around the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on earth, with its lake, its fountain and its mall. Read the city that grew from pearls and trade into glass and steel, from the abra crossing the Creek to the top of the tallest tower, at your own pace.