Salalah is unlike anywhere else in Oman, or in Arabia. At the country's far southern tip, almost in Yemen, this city of white-sand beaches, coconut palms and banana plantations has a secret that nature gives it every summer: the khareef, the monsoon that between June and September wraps its mountains in mist, turns them a deep green and fills them with waterfalls and streams, something impossible anywhere else on the desert peninsula. That's why, when the Gulf is baking in the heat, thousands of people fly to Salalah to cool off in the fog.
But Salalah is much more than the khareef. It's the land of frankincense: for thousands of years these mountains produced the aromatic resin that was worth as much as gold and was traded from here to Egypt, Rome, India and China. That trade left behind ancient ports (Al Baleed, Sumhuram) and legendary caravans, and put Dhofar on the map of the ancient world, linked even to the Queen of Sheba and the mythical lost city of Ubar. Four of those places now make up the 'Land of Frankincense' World Heritage Site.
This guide helps you plan your visit: when to come depending on whether you want the green of the khareef or the winter sun, which beaches and blowholes not to miss (Mughsail), how to explore the wadis and mountains, where to see frankincense trees and sites, and how to get around a Dhofar that easily fills several days. Salalah is Oman at its greenest, most tropical and most ancient, all at once: a surprise in the heart of Arabia.
Salalah and the whole Dhofar region owe their history to frankincense. For thousands of years, resin was harvested in the Dhofar mountains from Boswellia sacra trees. Frankincense was as valuable as gold in ancient times and was used in temples, funerals and medicine from Egypt to Rome, India and China. That trade made ports like Sumhuram (Khor Rori) flourish, founded more than 2000 years ago, and later Al Baleed (Zafar), the city that gave the region its name. Caravans set out from the interior, from oases like Ubar/Shisr, the legendary 'lost city of the sands', and tradition even links the Queen of Sheba to these frankincense lands. In the 20th century Dhofar went through a hard war (the Dhofar rebellion, 1965-1976), put down by Sultan Qaboos (himself born in Salalah) with British and Iranian help, after which the region became fully part of modern Oman. We tell that long story on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Oman's southern province, land of frankincense and the monsoon: Salalah, with its coconut-lined beaches and ancient frankincense-route ports, turns green and misty during the khareef, a tropical miracle in the middle of Arabia.
Read the history of The south: Dhofar →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
There was a time, thousands of years ago, when a simple resin was worth as much as gold and drove the trade of half the world. That resin was frankincense —luban in Arabic—, and almost all of it came from a single corner of the planet: the mountains of Dhofar, in the south of what is now Oman, around Salalah. Here, and in only a few other places in Arabia and the Horn of Africa, grow the twisted Boswellia sacra trees, whose wounded bark oozes the resin that, dried into golden tears, burned in the temples and funeral pyres of Antiquity.
Egyptians, Babylonians, Israelites, Greeks and Romans burned frankincense to honour their gods and their dead, used it in medicine and cosmetics, and paid luxury prices for it. Demand was so great that Dhofar became the heart of a trade network linking southern Arabia with Egypt, the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, India and even China, along overland caravan routes and by sea across the Indian Ocean. Frankincense made this remote land rich and famous, and it explains why the desert and coast of Dhofar hold ancient cities and ports that seem out of place given how isolated the region is today.
To understand Salalah is to understand frankincense. The resin is not a quaint souvenir: it is the reason this region had thriving ports, kings, temples and legends, and the reason UNESCO declared a group of sites a World Heritage Site in 2000 under the telling name 'Land of Frankincense'.
The frankincense trade built cities. The oldest that survives is Sumhuram, above the Khor Rori lagoon east of Salalah, founded more than two thousand years ago as a fortified port to control the export of the resin. From its docks, Dhofar frankincense was shipped to Arabia, India and the Mediterranean, and in return goods from all over the Indian Ocean arrived in Sumhuram. Its walls, temples and inscriptions, still standing above the lagoon, speak of a cosmopolitan city connected to the ancient world.
Inland, on the edge of the great Rub al Khali desert, tradition places the mythical city of Ubar (identified by some with the Shisr site), the 'lost city of the sands' or 'Atlantis of the desert'. It is said to have been an oasis and a collection point from which caravans set off north loaded with frankincense. Its legend —a rich, arrogant city swallowed by the sands as punishment— blends with stories from the Quran and One Thousand and One Nights. In 1992, an expedition believed it had found its remains at Shisr, although experts still debate whether it was a legendary city or, rather, a region and a key well on the route.
Centuries later, in the Middle Ages, the baton passed to the port of Al Baleed, next to present-day Salalah: the city of Zafar —which gave its name to Dhofar (Zufar)—, a major trading centre active between the 10th and 16th centuries, which traded frankincense, Arabian horses and other goods with places as far away as China. Its ruins, now in an archaeological park by the sea, close the long cycle of the frankincense cities.
Few lands have inspired as many legends as southern Arabia, and Salalah sits at the centre of them. The most famous is that of the Queen of Sheba, the ruler who, according to the Bible and the Quran, visited King Solomon laden with gold, spices and frankincense. Although most historians place the kingdom of Sheba in present-day Yemen and Ethiopia, local Dhofar tradition claims its share: the queen is said to have had a palace here —linked to the ruins of Sumhuram— and the frankincense she offered is said to have left from these shores. True or not, the story reflects an underlying truth: Dhofar frankincense reached the most powerful courts of the ancient world.
The figure of the prophet Job (Nabi Ayoub) is also revered in these mountains, where a tomb said to be his is shown and draws pilgrims. And the desert holds the legend of Ubar, the arrogant city punished by God. These stories, which mix sacred texts, myths and historical memory, give Salalah a special aura, different from the rest of Oman.
Beyond legend, Dhofar keeps unique traits that speak of its particular history: a language of its own is spoken here, Jibbali or Shehri, with ancient Semitic roots and distinct from Arabic; and the culture, the music and even the landscape —with its green mountains in summer— make this region a world apart, more tied to the Indian Ocean and southern Arabia than to the Persian Gulf.
Salalah's recent history has a harsh and decisive chapter: the Dhofar rebellion (1965-1976). In the 1960s, Oman was one of the most closed and poorest countries in the world, ruled by Sultan Said bin Taimur —who, paradoxically, lived secluded precisely in Salalah—, a regime that banned almost every sign of modernity: radios, cars, schools, even sunglasses, so the story goes. In Dhofar, the most marginalised region and treated almost as the sultan's private fiefdom, an armed insurgency broke out.
What began as a local revolt turned, with the backing of communist governments in the region, into a Marxist-inspired guerrilla war that sought to overthrow the sultan and spread the revolution across the Gulf. The conflict was long and bloody, fought in the mountains of Dhofar. The turning point came in 1970, when the sultan's son, Qaboos bin Said —born in Salalah and educated in Britain—, deposed his father in a palace coup and took power.
Qaboos combined a firm hand with a skilful 'hearts and minds' policy: he offered the rebels an amnesty, fully integrated Dhofar into the country as the 'southern province', and launched a massive development programme —schools, hospitals, roads, wells—. With British (including the SAS regiment) and Iranian military support, the Omani army gradually defeated the guerrillas, and by 1975-1976 the rebellion had been crushed. Modern, prosperous and stable Oman was born from that victory and those reforms.
Sultan Qaboos, who ruled Oman from 1970 until his death in 2020, had a special bond with Salalah, his hometown, and poured a large part of the country's modernisation effort into Dhofar. From that rebellious, marginalised region emerged a prosperous and proud Salalah: with its international airport, its large commercial port —one of the most important in the Indian Ocean—, its beach resorts and a tourism infrastructure designed to welcome the thousands of visitors who arrive every summer drawn by the khareef.
That monsoon, which turns the mountains green every year, has become the great engine of local tourism: the Salalah festival and the khareef season fill the city with families from the Gulf escaping the extreme heat of their own countries to enjoy the cool air, the mist and the waterfalls. Meanwhile, the rest of the year, the city offers sunshine, tropical beaches and the increasingly valued archaeological treasures of the 'Land of Frankincense'.
Today Salalah combines, like few places, the depth of history and the calm of the present: the frankincense tears that burned in the temples of Antiquity are still sold in Al Haffa souq; the ruins of the ports that traded with Rome and China rest by the sea; and the mountains that saw caravans and guerrillas pass by are covered every summer in an impossible green. It is the most singular corner of Oman, where Arabia becomes, for a few months, tropical.
