Viability director Guy Wilkinson turns tourist for a day in Dubai and heads to Sharjah, Nizwa and Doha to explore the accessibility of history, tradition and culture to the region’s visitors

Whether resident expatriates or week-long holidaymakers, visitors to the Gulf often seek an authentic experience of local history. In some places, it’s either difficult to find, or ironically, hard to tell when you do find it.

My wife and I broke the habit of a lifetime and decided to be tourists in Dubai the other day. We spent a pleasant enough couple of hours in Dubai’s Bastakiyah district, where the government has restored a block of old Iranian wind tower houses and filled them with galleries, museums, cafés, restaurants and gift shops. There are a couple of guest houses there too, including the XVA Gallery, a historic courtyard house which combines a contemporary art gallery with a vegetarian café and seven petite guest rooms, each featuring different interiors done up by local artists.

It’s a very welcome contrast to Dubai’s pervasive mirror-glass towers, international buffets and blaring discos, but is it authentic? I hate to downplay such a worthy endeavour, but the restoration work was so cleanly done throughout the district that one could hardly believe the original houses had been built a century before. The paintings and sculptures were great and I personally find the whole rarefied ambience of cafés filled with middle class, expat arty types very alluring. But somehow we felt there was an important missing link to the past of the place itself. The 10-room Orient Guest House, another delightful courtyard property there, proudly displayed a sign saying ‘Starbucks coffee served here’ on its outside wall, which seemed to sum it all up.

Similar historic downtown districts have been restored in Sharjah and Doha, and thanks to their deliberately rustic approach to finishing, they are arguably more successful.

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Step to Sharjah

Sharjah is a city of contrasts and mixes some very attractive parts such as its Khaled and Al Khan lagoon Corniches, the Qasba Canal, the Blue Souq and its Islamic-style university campus, with drab industrial areas. The Arts and Heritage Areas work so well, I believe, because they are not isolated from the ‘real’ Sharjah, and not restored so pristinely as to appear unreal. The district includes the restored Souk Al Arsah, where you can still get a cup of tea for a couple of dirhams and where the shops are dusty and affordable. And the art galleries and museums there, including the Sharjah Art Museum and Sharjah Museum of Islamic Arts and Culture, are genuinely worth a visit.

All these attractions are surrounded by hotels and serviced apartments, including most notably the Radisson Blu and Rotana.

In Doha, the equivalent is the Souq Waqif, adjacent to Grand Hamad Street and the CBD, where what was until recently a dirty working souq in a mish-mash of architectural styles dating mainly from the 1960s and ‘70s, has been ingeniously refurbished back to what might have been its appearance when the original souq there was founded 100 years ago.

Faced with a similar demographic imbalance to that experienced in Dubai, the Qataris have wisely invited Arab traders from Oman and other neighbouring countries to set up shop there, rather than turning the souq into a little India or an outpost of Manila, and for tourists, this really makes a difference.

It will be interesting to see if any of Doha’s intrepid entrepreneurs will attempt to develop a boutique hotel in the Souq Waqif. It’s a project that’s begging to be undertaken.

For a still more authentic experience, head for Nizwa in Adh Dakhiliyah, the heartland of Oman.

Nizwa was once the capital of Oman in the 6th and 7th centuries AH (13th century AD) and is now a delightfully quiet market town about an hour and a half from Muscat, and five to six hours’ drive from Dubai.

To the casual visitor, Nizwa’s souq and fort look a lot like other areas of the Gulf that have been ‘over-restored’. But give Nizwa a chance and it will reveal itself to you. It was not only the country’s capital, but also the crucible of silver-smithing in the Sultanate and true historic treasures can still be found. And when the tourists experience these attractions at the hands of their ever-friendly and attentive Omani guides, they know they have found the authentic Gulf historical experience they were always looking for.