Taqah Castle

About this place

Taqah Castle is a 19th-century fortified house in the old quarter of Taqah, a fishing town east of Salalah. Built of Taqah stone, a local limestone made largely of fossilised shells and corals, its two storeys rise around a courtyard. For decades it was the seat of the town's walis (governors); since 1994 it has been a museum of furnished rooms that still feel lived in. It was reportedly built as the home of an Al Mashani sheikh, grandfather of Sultan Qaboos's mother. In the first half of the 20th century it passed to the state as the wali's residence and office; towers and an outer wall followed in the 1960s. Restored in the early 1990s, it opened as a museum in May 1994, Oman's Year of Heritage, and reopened in July 2023 after further restoration. Visitors enter through the barza, where the walis received the public. Around the courtyard and its fresh-water well lie the guardroom, a small roofless prison and stores for weapons, firewood, dried fish, grain and dates. Upstairs, the wali's family quarters hold interconnected bedrooms, a majlis where the family took coffee and a formal sitting room, with kohl pots, belts, and pottery and porcelain traded from China, India, Europe and Zanzibar. As the crow flies, Taqah lies about 33 km east of central Salalah, on the road to Mirbat, some 32 km further east. Sumhuram at Khor Rori is about 4 km east and Wadi Darbat about 9 km north-east, so all three fit easily into one day.