This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Liwa Dates Festival, the social event of the summer for the Abu Dhabi oasis community on the northern edge of the Empty Quarter. In the slow days of summer, with temperatures averaging 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius), this is the place to be for families and friends. As the sun sets, cars begin quickly filling up the parking lot outside the giant white tent built just for the festival.

Inside the tent, in the evenings families and friends wander around pop-up booths that sell locally made clothing, perfume, spices, ghee (clarified butter used in local cooking), incense, and homemade sweets made from dates. Archival photos highlight the founder of the United Arab Emirates, Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, walking amid date palms. He was known for his love of trees, and Liwa is the ancestral home of the Bani Yas tribes, which include the Al Nahyan family.

“It’s really a date palm tree festival,” said Khalfan Abdullah Al Mehairbi, a spokesperson for the Abu Dhabi Heritage Authority, which organizes the festival. “This tree gives us everything. Every piece of it is used.”

The date palm tree is fundamental to the heritage and existence of the people in Liwa and the Gulf in general. For thousands of years, its fruit provided the main source of food; its seeds were ground up and used as a substitute for coffee; its bark made lighting a fire possible; and its leaves were woven to build homes, boats, mats to sit on, and baskets to transport items, particularly dates, by land and sea. Before the discovery of oil, dates were a currency for trade locally and the most lucrative product, aside from pearls, for bartering along Indian Ocean trade routes connecting the Gulf to South Asia and East Africa.

One Friday night, the most crowded spot at the festival was a competition in which kids raised their hands quickly to answer questions about UAE heritage in return for prizes provided by sponsors such as the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. But the palm tree is far from a thing of the past. Agricultural engineering is thriving in the area, and that is reflected in the rising prices of date palms at booths selling saplings.

“You used to be able to buy these saplings for a third of the price 10 years ago,” said Al Mehairbi. “More people are planting them now because engineering has created sturdier trees that require less care to grow strong.” Indeed, once a landscape of towering palm trees among sand dunes, Liwa today includes many groves with date palms short enough to harvest without the risks of climbing tall, spikey trunks.

The dried dates most people outside the region are familiar with are not for sale at the festival. In Arabic, this festival is called the Liwa Rutab Festival. Rutab refers to dates that are not quite ready to be dried, packaged, and stored. They are an anticipated and beloved treat in the weeks leading up the harvest. The last two weeks of July, when the festival takes place, is the peak time for rutab, which many people call “the happy season.” Families leaving the festival walk out with stacks of over 2-pound boxes of rutab, which range in color from light yellow to maroon, depending on the stage and variety of the date. The yellow ones are crunchy, whereas those closer to being harvested are a soft caramel. Prices, which run from 60 to 250 UAE dirhams (approximately $16 to $68) per box, are determined by the variety and how good the buyer is at bargaining.

The Liwa Dates Festival is part of a growing number of date festivals in the Gulf. Taking place at the same time as the Liwa festival, Sharjah’s Al Dhaid Date Festival is in its eighth year, Souq Waqif in Doha is in its ninth year, and the Omani Dates Festival is in its 10th year.

“On the surface, the date festival is no more or less than harvest festivals you see all over the world. But this is a region of relatively young nation states, most established in the mid-20th century, and many things have changed so rapidly that holding onto traditions going back centuries is grounding. Festivals are key to keeping intangible heritage and a community’s relationship with the past alive,” said Robert Parthesius, director of the New York University Abu Dhabi Dhakira Center for Heritage Studies, whose research focuses on the intangible heritage of the Indian Ocean trade routes. “In a modern context of international markets and industrialized agriculture, there is also the need to keep traditional knowledge alive. It might sound like nostalgia, but connecting the present to the past is serious business.”

Date festivals are also the story of tourism and trends. Saudi Arabia, the Gulf’s largest date producer, is also home to the oldest and biggest date festival, Buraidah Date Festival, which begins in August and runs for several weeks during the harvest season. With the opening of tourism in the kingdom, it is now being positioned as an event destination, as is the newer AlUla Dates Festival, which takes place in September, as well as the Al Ahsa Dates Festival in January and February.

As the cachet around dates as a superfood increases around the world, date entrepreneurship is also growing in the region. Just down the road from the festival is the Liwa Dates Company, one of the larger date factories in the UAE, which processes and packages harvests for date farmers across the region. “I started this company in 2006 to translate my love for this tree into a product of the future,” owner Mohammad Al Muhairi said, pointing to some of his innovations, which include date pickles, date ketchup, date superfood powder, and Datella (a substitute for Nutella). “As much as I talk about dates, I can never do them enough justice. Today, many countries have started planting date tree because they have realized the health importance of dates. They are also easy to grow, don’t need special storage, and do not need cooking and preparing. I can take a piece from the box and eat it directly. The date is for people who love good health and the future.”