The question nobody can answer from a screen
You are on the sand west of Mleiha. Are you allowed to be there?
It is a reasonable question with a legal answer, and there is no way to check it from a map. Not because the data is missing — that was our first guess and it was wrong — but because the data that exists describes different objects from the ones that govern you.
This page is what we found when we measured it, and what we still cannot tell you.
What we measured, and how
Anyone can repeat this; it takes about a minute.
We queried OpenStreetMap for every feature tagged
boundary=protected_area or leisure=nature_reserve across the
northern Emirates. Sixty came back. Two of them sit near Mleiha. We
pulled their geometry and ran a point-in-polygon test against our own
spot coordinates.
| Mapped area | Vertices | Area | Our pins inside |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meleiha Protected Area (محمية جبل مليحة) | 15 | 8.7 km² | Fossil Rock |
| Jabal Al Fayah Reserve (محمية جبل الفاية) | 228 | 35.1 km² | none of ours |
A note on how we nearly got this wrong. Our first pass searched the returned features for “mleiha” and “faya” and found nothing, and we very nearly published “protected ground is invisible on maps” on the strength of it. The list is in Arabic. The polygons were there the whole time, under محمية جبل مليحة and محمية جبل الفاية. We only saw them when we stopped searching and printed the names to read. A search that returns nothing has told you about your query, not about the world.
And here is the part that matters
Mleiha National Park was created by Emiri Decree 16/2024 at 34.2 km², operated by Shurooq. Its Article 4(7) requires a permit to drive a vehicle inside it.
The boundary map attached to that decree has never been published. We looked at the Ruler’s office, at Shurooq, at Visit Sharjah and at the Sharjah Archaeology Authority. It is not there.
So there are two kinds of boundary in this desert. The ones you can download, and the one that decides whether you are trespassing — and no member of the public can line them up.
Notice what that does to a driver. If there were no polygons at all, you would know you did not know, and you would go and ask. Instead the map shows you something real, specific and confident-looking, and the sand beyond its edge looks open. A quarter of an answer ends the question in a way that no answer would not.
The near-match we are not going to build on
One of the mapped polygons is 35.1 km². The decreed park is 34.2 km². That is within three per cent.
It is close enough to be suspicious and nowhere near close enough to be evidence. The mapped area carries a different name, and we could not establish whether the 2024 decree created a new area, extended an older reserve, or overlaps one. They may be the same object under two names. They may be neighbours. We do not know, so we are telling you the two numbers and stopping.
What this means for two specific places
Fossil Rock sits inside the smaller mapped polygon. That is a measurement, not an interpretation — the coordinate falls within the 15-vertex ring tagged Meleiha Protected Area. What legal weight that carries, we cannot say, because the tag is an OpenStreetMap tag and not a gazette.
The popular dune ground west of Mleiha sits inside neither polygon — while sitting roughly a kilometre from the archaeological centre that now controls access to the national park. On a map it reads as open desert. Under the decree it may well not be. Those two facts are both true at once, and that is the whole problem in one sentence.
Jebel Buhais, and a decree nobody can pin down
Jebel Buhais, the limestone ridge carrying one of the most important Neolithic cemeteries in south-east Arabia, is a gazetted nature reserve. Beyond that, the record disagrees with itself: ICOMOS’s 2025 evaluation of the Faya nomination refers to Emiri Decree No. 5 of 2018, while the Ruler of Sharjah’s own media office and the reporting that followed it name Emiri Decree No. (1) of 2018 as the instrument that created “Al Buhais Mountain Nature Reserve”.
We could not obtain the gazetted text of either, so we cannot say which is the error, or whether these are two separate instruments. We are printing the conflict rather than picking the more convenient number.
Enforcement is not theoretical
On 18 November 2023, Sharjah Police announced the complete closure of the Al Faya dunes area in the emirate’s central region. It came the day after an 18-year-old died in an off-roading crash there, and the General Command gave non-compliance with safety rules as the reason.
We have not established whether that closure remains in force, and we will not assume in either direction. It is the same desert.
What to do with all this
Not much has changed about how you should behave, which is the honest conclusion:
- The fence is the boundary you can actually see. The park’s whole perimeter was fenced between October 2024 and early 2025. It is cruder than a map and considerably more reliable.
- The Mleiha Archaeological Centre is who to ask about a specific patch of ground. Shurooq’s January 2026 statement makes it the route to a permitted visit, and it is the only body that can answer with authority.
- Treat any GPS track recorded before 2025 as history, not permission. The ground it crosses may have been fenced since.
- Do not read an absence on a map as permission. That is the specific mistake this page exists to name.
What we could not establish
- Where the decreed boundary of Mleiha National Park runs. The map is unpublished. Nobody outside the emirate’s offices can answer this.
- Whether the mapped 35.1 km² reserve and the decreed 34.2 km² park are the same legal object.
- Which decree number created the Buhais reserve, or whether there are two.
- Whether the November 2023 Al Faya closure still stands.
- What legal weight, if any, an OpenStreetMap protected-area tag carries here. It is community data, not a cadastre, and we have treated it as evidence of what a driver would see rather than of what the law says.
The honest footer
The polygon geometry, areas and point-in-polygon results on this page are our own measurements against public OpenStreetMap data, taken on 31 August 2026, and anyone can reproduce them. The decree, the fencing and the January 2026 access statement come from Sharjah’s own publications and the reporting that carried them. Where those sources run out, this page says so rather than filling the gap. Nothing here asserts that any patch of this desert is open to drive: the honest position is that the public record does not currently allow anyone — including us — to tell you where the line is.