Qatar

For most of its history Qatar's population lived along the coast, moving between pearling settlements in summer and inland wells and grazing in winter. Rock carvings at Al Jassasiya, cut into the limestone above the shore, record boats and games left by people who worked these waters.

The Al Thani family rose to leadership in the nineteenth century, and the pearl trade sustained the peninsula until the 1930s, when cultured pearls collapsed the market. Oil, and later natural gas, changed everything that followed.

Al Zubarah was one of the largest pearling and trading towns of the Gulf in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, connected to the Indian Ocean and beyond. Abandoned in the early twentieth century, it was buried by sand rather than built over.

That accident of preservation makes it exceptional: the walled town, its palaces, mosques, courtyard houses, harbour and canal survive as an unusually complete record of Gulf urban life before oil. It was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2013.

Doha holds both the restored alleys of Souq Waqif and the towers of West Bay, facing each other across the water. Between them stand the Museum of Islamic Art, the National Museum of Qatar and the arts and heritage district of Msheireb.

The city has become a hub for aviation, sport and media, and hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2022 — the first held in the Arab world.

Khor Al Adaid, the inland sea in the south, is one of the few places on earth where the sea reaches deep into the desert and tidal water lies among the dunes. It is a protected reserve, reached only across sand.

Elsewhere the peninsula offers mangroves at Al Thakira, limestone formations at Zekreet, and long stretches of quiet coast used by nesting turtles.