Al Hamra

Al Hamra grew where the water comes out of the mountain. A falaj fed by the wadis of the western Hajar made cultivation possible at the foot of Jebel Shams, and a settlement of date gardens and mud-brick houses developed on the slope above the plots. The town was settled in the late 17th century by the Al Abri tribe, under the Yaruba imams who drove the Portuguese from the Omani coast and rebuilt the forts and towns of the interior. The town belonged to the world of the Ibadi imamate centred on Nizwa, governed through tribal leaders and the sheikhs of the Abriyeen, whose name the hill village above the town still carries.

Al Hamra was never a fortress town on the scale of Bahla or Nizwa, and it has no great castle. Its wealth was agricultural — dates above all, with limes, bananas and fodder grown under the palms — and its position on the routes between the interior oases and the mountain villages gave it a modest trading role.

In the 20th century the interior's politics reached the town along with everyone else's: the imamate's autonomy under the 1920 Treaty of Seeb, the fighting of the 1950s and the storming of the Jebel Akhdar plateau in 1959. After 1970 tarmac roads, schools, electricity and piped water arrived, and families moved out of the old houses into concrete villas on the edge of town. The mud-brick quarter was left to erode, and parts of it have since been repaired as heritage buildings, while Misfat al Abriyeen has become one of the most visited villages in Oman.

Al Hamra belongs to Oman's Ibadi interior, and the rhythms of that world are plain here: the call to prayer over the gardens, majlis rooms where men receive guests, and a social life built around family, neighbours and the mosque. Men wear the white dishdasha with an embroidered kummah cap or a wrapped massar, and women wear long dresses with a headscarf. Hospitality is formal and unhurried — kahwa scented with cardamom, dates and halwa offered before any business is discussed.

The falaj is a cultural institution as much as an engineering one. Water rights are shared in timed turns among the families who own plots, an arrangement overseen by a local administrator and recorded in long-standing custom, and the channels are cleaned and repaired collectively. Ownership of the water can be distinct from ownership of the land, which is why the gardens below the old town are divided as finely as they are.

Traditional crafts and performance survive around the town's festivals. Omani sword-and-chant dances such as the razha accompany weddings and national holidays, and the two Eids are the year's social high points, preceded by the habta markets of the interior where livestock, clothes and halwa are sold. Visitors are generally welcomed with curiosity and courtesy; the expectation in return is modest dress and quiet behaviour in residential lanes, and patience with a town that is not organised around tourism.

Al Hamra is a small place, and most of its people live in the newer streets rather than the old quarter. Almost nobody lives in the mud-brick houses now — the last families left them in the decades after 1970 — and daily life happens along the main road, in the schools, the hospital, the small souq and the government offices of the wilayat.

Work divides between government employment, the date gardens and small businesses, with a growing share in tourism: guesthouse keeping in Misfat al Abriyeen, guiding on the mountain and running the vehicles that carry visitors up the Jebel Shams road. A great many families also have members working in Muscat or Nizwa and returning at weekends, a pattern common throughout the interior.

The day is shaped by heat and prayer. Farmers open their falaj turns and work the gardens early, shops and offices run through the morning, the middle of the day empties the streets in summer, and the town revives after the late afternoon prayer, with visiting, coffee and children playing outside into the evening. The pressures people talk about are those of small interior towns everywhere in Oman: jobs for young people, the cost of keeping old houses standing, and the balance between the visitors the hill village now attracts and the ordinary life of the families who live there.

Eating in Al Hamra means Omani home cooking or the straightforward food of small roadside restaurants. Dates come first: the gardens below the town grow several varieties, khalas among them, and a dish of them with kahwa — coffee brewed pale and flavoured with cardamom, sometimes with rosewater — is the standard greeting in any house. Halwa, the dense sweet paste of sugar, starch, ghee, rosewater and nuts, is served alongside it and bought for weddings and Eid.

The festive dish of the interior is shuwa: goat or lamb rubbed with a spice paste, wrapped and buried in a pit oven to cook for a day or more before families gather to open it. Majboos, spiced rice cooked with meat, and harees, wheat pounded with meat into a thick paste, appear at Eid and at weddings. Everyday meals are simpler — rice with chicken or fish brought up from the coast, Indian curries and breads in the town's restaurants, grilled meat, and laban, a salty buttermilk, drunk with it.

Produce from the mountain above the town reaches the local markets in season: pomegranates, apricots, peaches, walnuts and grapes from the terraced villages of the Hajar, along with local honey and the dried limes, loomi, that give Omani rice and soups their sour note. Bananas and limes grown in the shade of the palms below the old quarter are sold in the same shops as the dates.