The capital has been named as one of the top places for expats to live…

The 2020 InterNations Expat City Ranking survey has placed Abu Dhabi in tenth place, amongst some pretty stiff competition, in the ‘Best City for Expats’ table.

The top three spots, awarded as a result of survey responses, were all handed to European cities (Valencia, Alicante and Lisbon respectively). Panama City came fourth, Singapore fifth and our beloved Abu Dhabi tenth.

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The bottom 10 cities for expats, as ranked by the survey, contained some surprises. Hong Kong, Dublin, Paris all featured and Rome was rated as the second-worst city.

Results for 66 cities worldwide were obtained from than 15,000 expat survey respondents. That data pool reflected the opinions of 173 nationalities on more than 25 aspects of urban life quality including ease of getting settled, safety, friendliness of fellow residents, sustainability, jobs, finance and housing.

Abu Dhabi ranked relatively high in most categories across the board but scored big points for its friendliness and safety (78 per cent of expats feel ‘completely’ safe there for example, compared to a global average of just 45 per cent). The super low crime rates obviously have a lot to do with this.

In a dissection of the survey, the InterNations website states that “Expats in Abu Dhabi do not only find it easy to live there without speaking the local language (93 per cent vs. 54 per cent globally), but they also consider it easy to make new friends (57 per cent vs 47 per cent worldwide). Moreover, they describe the local population as both friendly in general (ranked 17th) and friendly towards foreign residents in particular (ranked 16th).”

You can find more information on the internations.org website.

Images: Getty