There's a corner of Qatar where the country looks like another planet. On the Zekreet peninsula, on the west coast, the desert turns into an almost lunar landscape: limestone mesas cut by the wind, cliffs above the gulf and, above all, the famous 'mushroom rocks', stone columns topped with caps of harder rock, sculpted by millions of years of erosion. It's a silent, strange and stunningly beautiful place, far removed —physically and aesthetically— from Doha's skyscrapers.
In the middle of that emptiness, two major surprises appear. One is 'East-West/West-East', a monumental work by the celebrated American artist Richard Serra: four huge steel plates more than fourteen metres tall, lined up across more than a kilometre between the mesas, one of the most impressive land art sculptures in the world. The other is Film City, a set of a traditional Arab village that was abandoned and can now be explored like a ghost town. Add to that the old Zekreet fort, dating from the 18th century.
This guide helps you plan the adventure: how to get there from Doha, where you need a 4x4 and where a regular car will do, how to find Serra's sculpture in the desert, when to go for the best sunset and stars, and what precautions to take in an area with no services. Whether you come for the art, the surreal geology, Film City or camping under a starry sky, Zekreet is Qatar's wildest and most surprising side.
Zekreet combines an ancient natural history with very modern chapters. The area's rock formations —the 'mushroom rocks', the cliffs and mesas of the Brouq Reserve— are the result of millions of years of erosion on limestone laid down when this land was under the sea, and they contain marine fossils. As for human history, the 18th-century Zekreet fort is a reminder that this west coast had settlements linked to fishing and to watching over the territory. But Zekreet's contemporary fame comes from two recent interventions: Film City, a traditional village set built for film and TV productions and later abandoned, which became a tourist curiosity; and above all Richard Serra's installation 'East-West/West-East', commissioned by Qatar Museums and unveiled in 2014, which turned this remote desert into a world-famous contemporary art destination. We tell the story of that blend of deep geology, coastal history and 21st-century art on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Qatar before gas, quiet and evocative: the ruins of the pearling town of Al Zubarah, the only Qatari site on the World Heritage List, and the surreal desert of Zekreet, with its mushroom rocks and Richard Serra's monumental sculpture.
Read the history of The north: pearls, forts and World Heritage →They depart from Doha, 72 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Zekreet's surreal landscape, you have to look much further back than any human date. You have to go back millions of years, to a time when this land was not desert but seabed. The limestone plateaus, the cliffs and the famous 'mushroom rocks' that amaze visitors today formed from sediments laid down under a warm, shallow sea that covered much of the Arabian Peninsula. Marine fossils can still be found in that rock, silent witnesses to that vanished ocean.
When the sea withdrew and the region emerged, Zekreet's other great sculptor got to work: the wind. Loaded with sand, the desert wind eroded the rock for thousands of years, wearing away the soft layers at the base faster than the hard layers on top. The result is those columns crowned by a stone 'hat', the mushroom rocks, along with jagged plateaus, ledges and whimsical shapes that give the peninsula its moonscape feel. It is pure geology, sculpture made by time and climate.
Much of that exceptional setting is now a protected area: the Brouq Nature Reserve (Ras Brouq), which protects not only the geological formations but also desert wildlife such as the Arabian oryx, the region's emblematic antelope. Before any fort, any film set or any steel sculpture, Zekreet was already a natural work of art, shaped over entire eras. That depth of time is the first layer of its history.
The Zekreet peninsula, so lonely today, was not always empty of people. As in the rest of the country, Qatar's west coast had settlements and activity tied to the sea: fishing, trade and the pearl diving that supported the Qatari economy for centuries, until the pearl trade collapsed in the early decades of the 20th century. In a land of scarce resources, every point on the coast with access to water and fishing grounds had its value.
One concrete trace of that past remains: Zekreet Fort (Qal'at Zekreet), which dates back to the 18th century. Although only partial remains survive today, walls and foundations, its existence confirms that this west coast was inhabited and watched over, and that it was part of the network of settlements and defences that organised Qatari territory before oil. In the Qatar of that period, forts served to protect resources, control routes and assert a presence on the land.
The history of the west coast changed radically in the 20th century with a discovery that transformed the whole country: oil was found in nearby Dukhan, where Qatar's first major oilfield was developed. That western part of the country, once marginal, became strategic for the hydrocarbon industry. Zekreet, however, stayed largely untouched by urban development and kept its remote desert character, which in the long run would be key to its new role as a natural and artistic setting.
One of the most curious and recent chapters in Zekreet's story is Film City, the traditional Arab village that appears, out of place, in the middle of the desert. Unlike the fort or Al Zubarah, it is not a real historic settlement but a set: a recreation of a traditional village, with mud houses, courtyards, towers and alleyways, built as a backdrop for film and TV productions. As part of its push into culture and media, Qatar wanted to offer locations for film and television, and this set was one of them.
Over time, the set was abandoned. With no use and no upkeep, the 'village' became a kind of ghost town in the desert, and that is where its charm lies today: its empty walls, silent alleys and towers under the sun create an atmosphere that is part nostalgic, part mysterious, and it draws curious visitors and photographers. Many visitors climb its structures to take in the desert landscape around it.
Film City neatly illustrates one side of contemporary Qatar: a country that, with its gas wealth, has experimented with all kinds of projects (cultural, media, artistic) and left some unusual places in its wake. The fact that an abandoned set has become a tourist attraction says a lot about a land where the ancient, the natural and the artificial sit side by side in a puzzling way. Alongside the age-old rocks and the 18th-century fort, the village that 'never was' is one more layer in Zekreet's strange palimpsest.
The event that put Zekreet on the world map came in 2014, and it came not from geology or local history but from contemporary art. That year saw the unveiling of 'East-West/West-East', a monumental work by the celebrated American sculptor Richard Serra (1938-2024), one of the great names in land art and minimalist sculpture of the 20th and 21st centuries. The piece was commissioned by Qatar Museums, the institution that, driven by Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani, turned Qatar into one of the world's biggest buyers and commissioners of art.
The work consists of four huge steel plates, about 10 centimetres thick and between 14.7 and 16.7 metres tall, set in a straight line stretching over a kilometre among the limestone plateaus of the Brouq Reserve. Serra, famous for steel sculptures that play with scale, weight and space, designed the installation to engage with the landscape: the plates line up between two inlets of the sea and follow the lie of the land, so the desert and the geology become part of the sculpture. Walking it, from one plate to the next, is a physical experience of space and vastness.
With this piece, a remote and empty corner of western Qatar became an internationally famous art destination, visited by sculpture lovers, photographers and travellers from all over the world. The decision to install a work on that scale in the middle of the desert, far from museums and cities, is a statement in itself: art goes out into the landscape and measures itself against nature and geological time. Serra died in 2024, leaving in Zekreet one of his most ambitious and evocative works.
Few places pack so many layers of time into so few kilometres as Zekreet. In a single outing, visitors can touch rock from a sea that existed millions of years ago in the mushroom formations, look over the remains of an 18th-century fort, wander through the abandoned set of a film village and stand before a 21st-century land art masterpiece. Deep nature, coastal history and contemporary art share the same desert, under a sky that fills with stars at night.
That combination also mirrors today's Qatar. The country that lived for centuries on pearls and fishing, and was transformed in the 20th century by oil and gas from nearby Dukhan, decided in the 21st century to invest in culture, art and tourism to diversify and project itself to the world. Serra's sculpture in the heart of Brouq is one of the boldest expressions of that strategy: bringing cutting-edge art to the most remote and unlikely place.
For travellers, Zekreet shows the wildest, quietest and most surprising side of Qatar, the complete opposite of Doha's skyscrapers. Driving its dirt tracks in a 4x4, walking among the rocks at sunset, feeling tiny in front of Serra's steel plates and camping under a starry sky is experiencing a country that never stops surprising. In this western desert, geological time, coastal memory and contemporary cultural ambition go hand in hand. That is Zekreet's real magic: a place where land, history and art blend into one.
