Salalah

Salalah's importance began with frankincense. The resin of Boswellia sacra, which grows in the dry valleys behind the Dhofar mountains, was carried down to the coast and shipped to Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean from ports on this plain — Sumhuram at Khor Rori, founded by the Hadramawt kingdom of southern Arabia in the 3rd century BC, and later Zafar, whose ruins at Al Baleed lie in the middle of the modern city. Medieval Zafar traded horses and incense across the Indian Ocean and was visited by Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and Zheng He; its ruins are part of the Land of Frankincense, inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2000.

Dhofar came under the rule of the Al Bu Said sultans of Muscat only in the 19th century, and for a long time it was treated almost as a separate possession. Sultan Said bin Taimur made Salalah his home and governed the country from here for much of his reign, and his son Qaboos was born in the city in 1940. Poverty and isolation helped fuel a rebellion in the mountains from 1965, which drew in Marxist fighters backed by South Yemen and was declared defeated in January 1976, after the 1970 change of ruler combined military campaigns with amnesty and development.

What followed changed the city completely: roads, schools, a hospital, an airport, a university and, from 1998, a deep-water container port at Raysut that made Salalah a transhipment hub between Asia, Africa and Europe. The city spread across the plain, khareef tourism grew into a season of its own, and the frankincense sites were excavated, protected and opened to visitors.

Salalah looks and sounds different from the rest of Oman. Coconut palms, banana plantations and papaya groves give it a tropical appearance, and Arabic here shares the plain with Jibbali, also called Shehri, spoken in the mountains behind the city, and with Mehri further west — South Arabian languages unrelated to Arabic and with no written tradition of their own. Many Dhofari families have kin in eastern Yemen and along the East African coast, and the city's shops and kitchens are full of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers and long-settled families.

Frankincense is part of daily life rather than a souvenir: burned in homes, offices and shops to scent rooms and clothes, passed around after meals, given to guests, and sold by grade and colour in the Al Haffa souq. Al-Bar'ah, a sword-carrying song and dance of Dhofar performed to drums and sung poetry, is still danced at weddings and festivals, and wedding songs in the mountain languages remain strong.

The khareef is the great social season. Families from across Oman and the Gulf arrive to picnic on wet green hillsides, sit in the drizzle and watch waterfalls that flow for only a few weeks, and the festival programme runs through the summer nights. Manners are those of Oman generally — unhurried greetings, coffee before business, modest dress, a reluctance to refuse directly — held to a little more firmly in Dhofar than in Muscat.

About 330,000 people live in Salalah and the surrounding plain, making it the third-largest city in Oman and much the largest in the south. It is low-rise and spread out, a grid of villa districts, shopping streets and plantations stretching perhaps twenty kilometres between the mountains and the sea, so almost every errand involves a car.

The economy rests on the port and free zone at Raysut, government employment, the university and health service, fishing, farming on the irrigated plain — coconuts, bananas, papayas, fodder and cattle — and a tourist season that peaks in the monsoon. A large share of the workforce comes from South Asia, and many Dhofari families also have members working in Muscat or the Gulf.

Days begin early. Fish is landed and sold soon after dawn, offices and schools start in the cool of the morning, and the middle of the day empties the streets outside the khareef. Life resumes after the late-afternoon prayer, when the seafront fills with walkers, football games and families eating on the grass. Water for the plain comes from springs and wells beneath the mountains, and falling groundwater, summer crowding and the growth of the city on to farmland are steady local concerns.

Dhofari cooking starts with the sea and the plantations. Kingfish, tuna, grouper, sardines, lobster and abalone are landed along the coast; the everyday meal is grilled or fried fish with rice, and mashuai — a whole kingfish spit-roasted and served on lemon rice — is the dish brought out for guests. Coconuts are cut open and drunk at roadside stalls, and the plain's small sweet bananas and papayas are sold by the box.

Meat is for occasions. Machboos, spiced rice cooked with goat, camel, beef or fish, is the festive standard, while shuwa — meat rubbed with spices, wrapped and cooked for a day or more in a covered pit — belongs to Eid. Harees, wheat beaten with meat into a thick paste, appears in Ramadan. Mountain families make ghee and drink fresh cow's and camel's milk, and camel meat is more common here than in much of the Gulf.

The city's restaurants tell its trade history. South Indian and Kerala kitchens serve biryani, parotta and fish curry with karak tea; Yemeni houses serve mandi and haneeth, lamb or chicken cooked in a pit oven over rice and shared from one tray. Kahwa, coffee with cardamom and often rosewater, is poured in small cups with dates and halwa, the dense saffron-and-rosewater sweet eaten with the fingers, and frankincense is burned at the end of a meal.