Claire Munro has lived and worked all over the Gulf, but never found a place to call home — until now. “My head is spinning with what’s going on here,” she says. “Tomorrow, I’m going to start looking for a place to buy to live in.” It is two o’clock on a stiflingly hot afternoon and the 28-year-old chartered surveyor from Edinburgh, who moved to the Gulf a decade ago with her boyfriend, looks out over a desertscape of cranes and half-built tower blocks stretching to the dusty horizon and beyond. Dubai?

No. Munro has “lived there, done that”. Welcome to Abu Dhabi.

It may be the richest city state in the world — its 420,000 citizens sit on 10% of the planet’s oil and are worth £8m apiece — but the local property market is just getting started. And how. The largest of the seven United Arab Emirates, and the nation’s capital, it is investing £100 billion in property and tourism ventures in an epicly extravagant bid to keep up with, and eventually overtake, its gaudy neighbour.

Does the Middle East really need another Dubai a two-hour drive away from the original? Isn’t one blinging emirate where five-star hotels and razzle-dazzle real estate attract more hookers than hookahs more than enough?

“Yes and no,” says Eisa al-Ali, a senior project manager at Aldar, the state-backed developer behind most of the projects. “Yes, because we have a chance to be even more successful than Dubai. And no, because we don’t want to be like Dubai. We have the opportunity to get it right, to create something of quality. We don’t just want to build units, units and more units.”

More traditional, more religious and much, much richer than Dubai, Abu Dhabi wants to be a more cultured desert oasis — an Edinburgh to Dubai’s Glasgow. That’s why Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Abu Dhabi’s ruler and president of the UAE, is spending £10 billion opening “branches” of the Louvre, the Guggenheim and the Sorbonne, designed by leading architects including Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Tadao Ando and Frank Gehry. Why the new hotels, such as the Shangri-La, seem right out of the Arabian Nights, rather than Blade Runner. And, for that matter, why the new homes have not yet been built. “We’re not in a rush,” al-Ali says. “We want to make sure we build the right infrastructure, get the best architects and the right quality.”

If the scale models are accurate, Abu Dhabi’s developments will outgun most Dubai schemes when they are completed 2-3 years from now. At Al Raha Beach, a £7 billion, seven-mile stretch of high- and low-rise waterfront residential blocks, townhouses and marinas, the architecture is world-class. The drum-shaped Aldar building is as bleeding-edge modern as the Gherkin, in London. Even the interiors of the planned flats and townhouses look less like hotel rooms than most modern developments in the Middle East.

It’s the same story on Yas Island, opposite Al Raha Beach. The flats, villas, hotels and occasional sheikh’s palaces make the vaunted Palm islands of Dubai look like an Arabian Milton Keynes. Just over the water from downtown Abu Dhabi, on Al Reem Island, Oceanscape, a new development by Damac, the Gulf’s leading private-sector developer, is a hypermodern, 32-storey curve of blue glass that would not look out of place in Manhattan. In each development, roads and canals are planned to far exceed current demand, in order to avoid the chronic transport problems that, at peak times, turn Dubai into a bigger traffic jam than Los Angeles.

Abu Dhabi has other advantages. Flights to and from it are quicker and much cheaper than to Dubai: British Airways fares can be one-third lower. Because it is built on a series of islands, there is no shortage of high-quality natural beachfront. There are more local Emirati and Gulf investors than in Dubai, which should promote mixed developments and avoid the creation of the white ghettos that make Dubai such a divided society. Since last month, Abu Dhabi also has a high-quality English-language broadsheet news- paper, The National.

It may be less frenetic, better planned and more cultured, but is Abu Dhabi a better bet for the canny investor?

Early adopters hoping to find bargains will be better off looking at the other new emirates on the block (see below). Fancy designers and fancy materials — all imported — don’t come cheap.

Put that together with recent local price rises — flats and villas across the UAE have more than doubled in price in the past three years — and there are none of the £80,000 flats that could be had when the Gulf property market first opened up five years ago. At the Al Muneera development, in Al Raha Beach, for example, prices start at £150,000 for a one-bed flat, rising to £1m-plus for penthouses and beachfront villas.

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