A hill with no official name
Pink Rock is a small limestone hill standing alone in the red dunes of Sharjah’s central region, in the Al Madam municipality. Elevation models put its high ground at roughly 248 m above sea level, standing something like 75 to 100 m above the sand around it. It sits about 7 km from Big Red and about 19 km from Fossil Rock.
That is nearly everything we can state plainly, and the rest of this page is about why.
There is no official name. We could not find “Pink Rock” on any Sharjah government page — not Visit Sharjah, not Shurooq, not the federal environment ministry’s ecotourism register, which does carry entries for Fossil Rock and for Al Badayer. We could not source an Arabic name for it either. It is a visitor-coined English nickname that stuck.
It is not on OpenStreetMap. Not under that name, anywhere. What OSM has at this location is a peak tagged Camel Rock — which is a problem, because the UAE’s Ministry of Climate Change and Environment describes Camel Rock as one of the features flanking Fossil Rock, in the Mleiha cluster about 14 km away. The OSM node sits 332 m from our Pink Rock pin and 1,160 m from our own Camel Rock pin. We are not going to pretend that is resolved: the map label and the ministry disagree, and we can only tell you which is which by coordinate.
Is it actually pink?
Almost certainly not the rock.
A photograph taken at the site shows a low, dark grey-brown limestone ledge, rust-stained, half-buried in and dusted by vivid orange-red dune sand. In daylight the outcrop is not pink. What is pink is the sand and the low sun — at sunrise and sunset, red aeolian sand under a low angle throws a colour the hill picks up.
The explanation you will read everywhere is iron-oxide staining. That is chemically ordinary for Gulf limestone and it would contribute. But we could not find anyone who measured or documented it at this hill, so we are describing what the photographs show rather than asserting a mechanism.
Where the internet’s Pink Rock geology actually comes from. One sentence circulates verbatim across travel blogs, a car dealer’s guide and AI summaries: that Pink Rock is a jebel of Upper Cretaceous Simsima limestone, highly fossiliferous, part of a ridge running from Ras Al Khaimah to Al Ain. We traced it to a single origin — a photographer’s caption on his own portfolio pages. No geological survey, ministry document or peer-reviewed paper we could find names “Pink Rock” at all. The surrounding Faya jebels genuinely are Late Cretaceous limestone anticlines including the Simsima Formation, so the description is plausible by context. It is just not sourced for this specific hill, and one caption is not a source.
Three coordinates, and why they disagree
| Source | Coordinate | Distance from ours |
|---|---|---|
| Ours (from the app’s own spot data) | 25.02476, 55.73048 | — |
| A scraped directory listing | 25.0228, 55.7292 | ~260 m |
| A well-known off-road blog | 25.041056, 55.732444 | ~1.8 km |
The spread is not carelessness by any of them. It is what happens when a place has no official coordinate to anchor to: everyone drops their own pin, and the pins drift.
Ours sits on the hill’s flank at about 206 m, roughly 430 m from the highest ground. For a driver that is the right place to be — you are heading for the sand around the hill, not the summit — but it is worth knowing that it is not the peak.
The access question, honestly
This is the part that changed, and it is the part no other page about Pink Rock mentions at all.
- Sharjah’s Emiri Decree 16/2024 created Mleiha National Park, managed by Shurooq. Its Article 4(7) requires a permit to drive a vehicle inside the park.
- The whole boundary is physically fenced. Shurooq and the Directorate of Public Works fenced the entire 34.2 km² between October 2024 and early 2025.
- Shurooq restated the rule on 24 January 2026: visits are limited to approved, organised activities supervised by the Mleiha Archaeological Centre, booked through the Centre, on designated routes — and unauthorised entry “by any type of vehicle, without exception” draws financial penalties and legal action.
And the honest complication: the decree says its boundaries “shall be in accordance with the attached map”, and that map has never been published. We checked the Ruler’s office, Shurooq, Visit Sharjah and the Sharjah Archaeology Authority. OpenStreetMap has no polygon for the park either. So nobody can tell you whether a specific pin is inside it — and a page that tells you confidently either way is inventing the answer.
What you can observe is the fence. It is a boundary a driver can actually see, which right now is more than the paperwork offers.
A documented precedent, so you know 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, the day after an 18-year-old died in an off-roading crash there. The General Command gave non-compliance with safety rules as the reason. We have not been able to establish whether that closure is still in force in 2026, and we are not going to assume in either direction — but it is the same landscape, and it shows what happens after a bad weekend.
One claim we are flagging rather than publishing. In researching this page, a check against UNESCO’s boundary data indicated that Pink Rock — and Big Red — fall inside the inscribed Faya Palaeolandscape World Heritage property, listed in July 2025. We could not reproduce that ourselves: UNESCO’s site returns 403 to us on every request, including a control. If it is right it matters a great deal, so we are recording it as an open question rather than stating it. Do not treat its absence from the rest of this page as evidence either way.
The drive
The terrain is moderate rolling dunes — this is not a technical spot, and the app’s Intermediate grade is not about a hard obstacle.
What raises it is traffic on blind crests. This is a popular, easily-reached area close to the Dubai–Hatta corridor, and the thing that hurts people here is meeting a vehicle coming the other way over a ridge neither driver could see past. Approach every crest slowly and square, keep real spacing in your convoy, and do not take a line just because the car in front did.
Nearest tarmac is roughly 1.5 km away, so this is a short run in rather than an expedition — which is also why it fills up.
What we could not establish
- Whether any specific point here is inside Mleiha National Park. The boundary map is unpublished. Nobody can answer this.
- Whether the November 2023 Al Faya closure still stands.
- Whether Pink Rock is inside the Faya Palaeolandscape World Heritage property. Indicated by one check we could not reproduce.
- An Arabic or official name. OSM offers one as an alternative name on that peak, but it belongs to the same transliteration family as Fossil Rock’s name 19 km away, so we will not print it as this hill’s.
- Any measurement of the pink colour at this outcrop specifically.
The honest footer
Coordinates, distances and elevations on this page were measured in August 2026 against public elevation data and open mapping data, and the disagreements between published sources are printed rather than resolved silently. The access section rests on Sharjah’s own decree and Shurooq’s dated statements; where those run out, we say so. Nothing here asserts that Pink Rock, its crests or the area around it is without risk — the hazard that actually catches people here is another vehicle you cannot see. The app lists our pin as Intermediate-graded (indicative), and that grade describes the traffic more than the sand.