The arid Dawkah valley is home to one of Oman's most prized resources: not oil or gas but frankincense trees, their fragrant sap harvested for millennia by residents who call it "white gold". Located ...

A small, wooden plank sways softly in the afternoon breeze in the sleepy town of Mirbat in Oman’s Dhofar region. It reads “Old Mirbat Market” and hangs loosely from a broken wooden frame. Walk into ...

Centuries before oil became the currency of power in West Asia and post-Ottoman Arab fraternity its lever, another commodity earned the region fortune and fame in equal measure. Its importance ...

Mention frankincense, and it’s hard not to instantaneously think of Christmas. Cited in the story of the birth of Christ in the Bible’s Book of Matthew, it was one of the precious gifts (alongside ...

The intoxicating smell of incense is one I’ve always associated with Christmas Eve. Typically, I’d be inhaling the scent while wrapped in a thick coat and huddled into a church pew. But today, I’m ...

Bananas are my first surprise. "They grow here," a Salalah resident boasts. "In Salalah in the desert." It's an oddity: tropical fruit thriving in this corner of the Arabian Desert. From an arid ...

Sign up for the best picks from our travel, fashion and lifestyle writers. The smell of frankincense – a hard-to-pin-down, piquant-woody aroma – wafts around the ...

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the trend for frankincense was short-lived – forgotten about after the three wise men famously gifted it. Far from it. Trade in frankincense flourished for ...

Khalid Al Amri is a ‘frankincense sommelier’ for Shangri-La’s hotels in Oman. He’s pictured here in the lobby of Shangri-La Al Husn, Muscat You’d be forgiven for thinking that thetrend for ...

The smell of frankincense – a hard-to-pin-down, piquant-woody aroma – wafts around the maze-like lanes of the centuries-old Muttrah Souk in Muscat. In every other store, terracotta pots are piled high ...