Souq Waqif

Souq Waqif is Doha's oldest place and, since a restoration finished in 2006 rebuilt it in mud render and exposed timber on the plan of the market that stood here for a century, its most loved: the standing market — waqif — where the Bedouin came to trade goats and wool at the wadi's edge, now a warren of alleys selling spices, textiles, incense, gold, birds and, in its own courtyard, falcons, with a falcon hospital next door and an autumn auction of the season's birds. Around it are the fort of Al Koot from 1927, the police stables of Arabian horses, the Souq Waqif Art Centre, the boutique hotels folded into the old houses, and the restaurants — Iranian, Moroccan, Yemeni, Qatari — whose tables spill into the lanes at night with the shisha and the karak tea; beyond it, the Corniche curves seven kilometres along the bay past the dhows to the towers of West Bay, the Museum of Islamic Art sits on its point in the water, Al Fanar's spiral minaret and the Amiri Diwan look down from the north, and Msheireb, the new old-town, rises to the south-west with its house museums. It is the one place in the Gulf's newest city where the traveller walks, at night, among people who live there.

The traveller comes at dusk, when the heat lifts and the lamps go on, and walks without a plan: the spice lane and the textile lane, the bird souq, the falcon courtyard — where a hooded saker sits on the arm of a man who will explain it — and, on the right day, the falcon hospital's tour; the fort and the stables at the western end; a karak at a stall and a plate of machboos or an Iranian kebab at a table in the lane; the walk across the road to the Corniche for the dhows and the skyline; the Museum of Islamic Art in the morning, air-conditioned and superb, and its park; Msheireb's museums of the four houses; and, on the second evening, the souq again, because it is different every night, and the shisha courtyard where the old men play cards.

The Guide's honesty: the souq is a restoration and knows it — the beams and the mud are new on an old plan, and the traveller who wants the pearl-divers' Doha finds it in the photographs at Msheireb, not in the lanes; the summer heat is not weather but a wall, and Doha lives indoors and at night from June to September; alcohol is in the hotels only, and modesty in dress is the courtesy of the place; the metro's gold line stops at the souq's door; and the falcon courtyard at dusk, with the birds turning their heads under the hoods and the karak steaming at the stall, is the Gulf at its most itself, which is why the Guide keeps this page warm and unhurried.