Liwa (Al Batinah)

Every time I mentioned we were headed to Liwa, someone assumed I meant the desert oasis three hours away in the UAE. This Liwa — a small wilayat on Oman’s Al Batinah coast, north of Sohar — shares nothing with its Emirati namesake except the name and a general sense of being overlooked. We went because a map showed mangrove channels near the coast road, and mangroves in a country I associated mostly with sand and mountains felt worth a detour.

Mangroves on the Batinah Coast

Oman’s mangrove forests are concentrated in a handful of spots, and the stand near Liwa is one of the least visited. We walked out along a raised path at low tide, past channels where small fish darted between the roots and herons stood motionless in the mud, waiting. It’s a strange, humid pocket of ecosystem dropped into an otherwise arid coastline, and the silence out there — broken only by wading birds and the occasional outboard motor somewhere down the channel — felt like a genuinely different country from the wadis and forts everyone comes to Oman for.

The Fort Nobody Restored

Liwa’s old fort sits inland from the fishing harbor, unrestored and slowly losing its battle with the weather — no ticket booth, no signage, just a crumbling mudbrick structure you can walk into if you’re careful about where you put your feet. Lia climbed a half-collapsed staircase to what used to be a lookout point, and from up there the view was mostly date palms and satellite dishes, which is its own kind of honest snapshot of how these coastal towns actually live now.

We ended the afternoon on an empty beach a few minutes from the fort — soft sand, shallow water, a handful of fishing boats pulled up above the tideline, and not another visitor in sight.

When to go: November through March, when the coastal humidity is at its most tolerable. Combine it with Sohar or Shinas as part of a slower drive along the northern Batinah coast rather than a standalone trip.