Zubarah
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How it came to be
Al Zubarah is a ruined walled town on the northwest coast of Qatar, about 105 km from Doha. In the mid-18th century Utub families from Kuwait settled here, and with a sheltered harbour the town grew rich on pearls and trade.
In the 1770s merchants and families from around the Gulf moved in, and in 1783 the Al Khalifa and their allies based at Zubarah took Bahrain. Most of the town was destroyed in 1811, and it was finally abandoned in the early 20th century. Its fallen stone houses were buried by desert sand.
Because the town flourished only briefly, its 18th-century plan survives almost intact. Palaces, mosques, courtyard houses, fishermen's huts, the harbour and a double town wall have been traced, and a fort built in 1938 stands nearby. Large-scale research began in 2009, and the site was inscribed in 2013.
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