Abu Dhabi · Mina Zayed
Marsa Mina Murals
1,163 metres of painted wall along the old port — the longest continuous mural in the capital.
Marsa Mina is a waterfront destination at Zayed Port in Mina Zayed, opened in early 2020 beside the Abu Dhabi Cruise Terminal. Its defining feature is a continuous run of street art measuring 1,163 metres along the perimeter walls of the port — the longest mural in the capital, and the first thing many visitors arriving by cruise ship see of the city.
From 2020 the Abu Dhabi Ports Authority granted a collective of local artists permission to paint along the port wall, and the project grew to involve artists of several nationalities. Fatima Al Hammadi supervised the mural project; contributors include Talal Shehab, Maddy Butcher, Tony Martin (Toons One), Malak Gallery and the collective @UAE_Graffiti_Artists. Much of the painting was carried out at night to avoid working in the daytime heat.
The result is deliberately eclectic rather than a single curated scheme. Styles run from abstraction and realism to impressionism, calligraphy and symbolism, and the subject matter ranges across cultures: a falcon by Talal Shehab, horses, cats and wildlife panels by Malak Gallery, portraits including Maddy Butcher's Noodles, depicting two pupils on the autism spectrum, a study of an Emirati man by @UAE_Graffiti_Artist, and a section riffing on Piet Mondrian's grids. Talal Shehab has described the project's aim as beautifying one of the country's principal tourist gateways.
The surrounding destination extends the industrial-reuse theme: retail units are housed in recycled shipping containers, themselves decorated with street art and graffiti, alongside food trucks, boutiques and a children's play area. The murals are outdoors, on public walls, and free to walk at any time; the retail and food outlets keep their own hours.
Exhibo editorial
Cruise passengers get about six hours in Abu Dhabi and most of them spend it on a coach to the Grand Mosque. What they walk past on the way out of the terminal is a kilometre of wall that nobody curated — a falcon, then some horses, then a Mondrian pastiche, then two kids painted by a teacher who works with pupils on the autism spectrum.
That incoherence is the appeal, and it is worth defending. The instinct in a city building Saadiyat is to commission: pick the artists, agree the theme, control the outcome. Here the port authority handed a collective of locals a wall and let it happen at night, in whatever styles they had. So the thing reads as a real place rather than a designed one, and it is the closest Abu Dhabi comes to street art that was not a strategy. Walk the full length in the cooler months — it takes twenty minutes and the quality swings wildly, which is exactly right.
How to find it
At Zayed Port in Mina Zayed, next to the Abu Dhabi Cruise Terminal — enter via Gate 2. The murals run along the port perimeter walls rather than being concentrated in one spot, so park at Marsa Mina and walk the wall in one direction; the full run is 1,163 metres, roughly twenty minutes at a slow pace. The painted shipping-container retail units sit within the destination itself. Free and open air at any hour, though the shops and food trucks keep their own hours; go in the cooler months or after dark, as there is little shade along the wall.
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