Qeshm

Qeshm's history is the history of the strait it guards. Its position at the mouth of the Gulf drew invaders from the Elamites to the Umayyads and Abbasids, and through the Islamic centuries it lay on the sea route between Basra, India and East Africa, supplying water, salt and boats to the ports that controlled the trade. When the kingdom of Hormuz dominated the mouth of the Gulf, Qeshm was its larder and its water supply.

The Portuguese came in the sixteenth century, taking Hormuz and building a fort on Qeshm to hold the channel. In 1622 a combined force of Safavid troops under Shah Abbas and ships of the English East India Company drove them out, an episode that shifted Gulf trade to the mainland port that became Bandar Abbas. British naval power dominated the Gulf through the nineteenth century, and the island was occupied at times during that period; its people lived from fishing, pearling, salt and boat building, and from the long-distance dhow trade to Arabia, India and Zanzibar.

Modern Qeshm was shaped by two decisions: the establishment of a free-trade zone on the island around 1990, which brought duty-free markets, an airport, new roads and a jump in population, and the protection of its geology, which led to the island's canyons, caves and coasts being recognised as a UNESCO Global Geopark and opened a modest tourism economy based on landscape. Gas and oil installations along the Gulf coast and the shipping lanes of the strait remain the strategic backdrop to everything here.

Qeshm belongs to the Bandari world of the southern Iranian coast, which has as much in common with the Arabian shore and the Indian Ocean as with the Iranian plateau. Most islanders are Sunni Muslims, a minority within Iran, and speak a southern dialect alongside Persian; Arabic and Balochi are heard as well. The music is drum-led and fast, played on the large dohol drum, the neyanban bagpipe and hand percussion, and is closely tied to weddings and celebrations.

Dress is distinctive. Women on the island have long worn bright, loose clothing and, among older generations, the boregheh, a stiff embroidered mask-like face covering unique to this coast that visitors are asked not to photograph without permission. The island's other signature craft is boat building: the wooden lenj, built by eye without plans in yards at Laft and other creeks, carried the Gulf's trade for centuries, and the knowledge behind it is recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.

The sea sets the social calendar — fishing, tides, the timing of boats to the mainland — and hospitality is taken seriously, with homestays in village houses now a normal way for Iranian travellers to visit. Older coastal traditions survive quietly, including healing ceremonies known as zar that arrived with the Indian Ocean trade. Village life is conservative and unhurried, and the island's free-zone towns, with their malls and traffic, feel like a separate country from the fishing settlements twenty minutes away.

Around 120,000 people live on the island, most of them in Qeshm town at the eastern tip and in Dargahan, with the rest in several dozen fishing and farming villages strung along the two coasts. The free-trade zone is the biggest employer in the towns: markets, warehousing, port work, construction and administration, along with the shipyards and the industrial installations on the coast. Fishing, shrimping and boat building support the villages, and a small tourism economy of drivers, guides, boatmen and homestays has grown up around the geopark.

Water and heat govern everything. The island has little fresh groundwater; wells cut into rock, cisterns that catch winter rain and, now, desalination and a pipeline from the mainland supply the towns, and gardens are small and walled. From May to September outdoor work stops in the middle of the day, and the towns come alive after dark.

The island has grown quickly, and the results are visible: new apartment blocks and shopping centres near Qeshm town, roads pushed into the interior, and villages losing young people to the towns or to the mainland. The national economic crisis, with its inflation and collapsed currency, is felt in the price of imported goods and of fuel for boats, while the strait's strategic importance means naval and security matters are part of ordinary life here in a way they are not elsewhere in Iran.

Qeshm eats from the sea. Fish — mackerel, king fish, snapper, grouper — is grilled over charcoal or fried after a rub of turmeric, garlic, lime and hot pepper, and shrimp, crab and cuttlefish appear in season. The dish that defines the coast is ghalyeh mahi, a thick, dark stew of fish with tamarind, fresh coriander, garlic and plenty of chilli, eaten with rice; made with shrimp it is ghalyeh meygu. Dried and salted fish, hung in the sun, is a store-cupboard staple and appears in stews when the boats cannot go out.

Southern Iranian cooking is hotter and more sour than the food of the plateau, and closer to the Gulf's other shores. Rice is often cooked with dill, broad beans or turmeric; flatbread comes thin and blistered from a clay oven, and tomshi and other local breads are made at home. Samosas and falafel, brought over by Indian Ocean and Arab trade, are sold as evening street food, and dates, tamarind, dried limes and spice mixes fill the markets, with much of the produce coming over from the mainland groves.

Drinks are tea, drunk strong and dark through the day, doogh, which is salted yoghurt thinned with water, and fresh fruit juices; alcohol is illegal throughout Iran. On hot evenings families buy ice cream and faloodeh, the frozen starch noodles in rose syrup that are a national sweet, and eat them on the seafront.