The courtyard house
Family rooms, a shop and a two-storey tower.
Clémence Jacqueri — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Alexandermcnabb — CC BY-SA 4.0 · BasoBoso — CC BY 4.0 · Ulises Icardi — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Alexandermcnabb — CC BY-SA 4.0
Al Hayl Castle, also called Al Hayl Fort, is the fortified mountain home of Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamdan Al Sharqi, on a rise above Wadi Hayl in the Hajar Mountains, about 13 km south-west of Fujairah city. Walls with firing slots enclose a courtyard house with a two-storey tower, beside a small mosque and a majlis, and a watchtower on the hill behind commands the valley. Fujairah's tourism authority dates the fort to 1830, but locals interviewed for a 2006 study said the sheikh built the present house around 1932 and the watchtower soon after, first as a home for his younger brother Suhail. The house rose in a village of the Kunud tribe, date and tobacco farmers who resettled down the wadi in the 1970s. The house and village were restored between about 2005 and 2009. Rooms open off the courtyard: family rooms, a kitchen, a date store and a shop that once sold rice, coffee and rose water. The walls, of local gabbro stone bound with mud and saruj, a burnt-clay mortar, carry roofs laid on mangrove poles. Palm gardens, the old village's stone houses and tobacco-drying rooms surround it, and radiocarbon-dated charcoal places a nearby ruined hillfort at about 1470 to 1705. An asphalt road ends at a car park below the castle, 17 km by road from Fujairah Fort (20 to 30 minutes by car or taxi). As the crow flies, Fujairah Fort lies 12.6 km north-east and Al Bidyah Mosque 41 km north (about 54 km by road). Come from November to March.
Family rooms, a shop and a two-storey tower.
On the hill behind, commanding the valley.
Stone houses and tobacco-drying rooms.
Old Al Hayl village, Wadi Hayl, south-west of Fujairah city
It is often called one, but a 2006 study of the house says Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamdan lived there all year round for more than 20 years. Around 1958 he moved to a new house on the coast north of Mirbah, and in the early 1960s to Dibba.
Visitor guides list 8:30 to 13:30 and 16:30 to 18:30 from Saturday to Thursday, and Friday afternoons only. Times can change, though, and one visitor report describes finding the fort closed until a guard let them in, so plan a morning visit from Saturday to Thursday.