The only city in Arabia with monsoon forests — Frankincense Road UNESCO sites, turtles nesting on the beach, and a landscape that turns green when the rest of Arabia burns
Salalah is the capital of Dhofar — the southernmost region of Oman, on the Arabian Sea coast 1,000km from Muscat. It is geographically and culturally unlike anywhere else in Arabia: during the khareef (June–September monsoon), the normally arid Dhofar mountains above the city receive moisture from the Indian Ocean monsoon and transform into the only cloud forest in the Arabian Peninsula — green hillsides, waterfalls, grazing cattle, and mist in temperatures of 25°C while the rest of Arabia melts at 45°C. The khareef tourism is Salalah's primary season, when hundreds of thousands of Gulf touri…
The Dhofar region was the primary source of boswellia sacra frankincense — the most expensive commodity in the ancient world, worth more by weight than gold in the Roman Empire, burned in temples from Egypt to China. The Land of Frankincense is a UNESCO World Heritage site comprising Wadi Dawkah (wild frankincense groves), Sumhuram (the ancient port), and Al Baleed — together documenting the 3,000-year frankincense trade. The city of Zafar (modern Al Baleed) was at its peak in the 13th–14th centuries a major Indian Ocean port visited by Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. The Dhofar rebellion (1962–1…