Al Khor and Al Thakhira Municipality

Al Khor sits where Qatar's best pearl beds once lay. The Al Muhannadi tribe founded the settlement mid-18th century, 50 kilometers north of what would become Doha, specifically because the shallow waters here produced superior pearls—larger, more lustrous, more valuable than those at Al Wakrah or other coastal camps. For 150 years, summer pearling expeditions defined the rhythm of life: May through September, dhows carried 1,400+ divers to harvest oysters, then the fleet hauled ashore and the population dispersed inland until the next season. Japanese cultured pearls destroyed this economy between 1920 and 1930, collapsing prices and ending millennia of Gulf pearling. Al Khor could have become a ghost town—many similar settlements did. Instead, oil rewrote the story without erasing the original. Qatar discovered oil in 1939, began exporting in 1949, and by the 1970s built Ras Laffan Industrial City just north of Al Khor to process the North Field's natural gas. The Pearl GTL plant, the world's largest gas-to-liquids facility, opened there in 2011. But unlike Al Wakrah, which transformed from fishing village into container port and petrochemical sprawl, Al Khor retained its character as a fishing town that happens to be adjacent to energy infrastructure. Population grew to ~250,000 by 2025, many working at Ras Laffan but living in Al Khor. The fishing port remains active—234 artisanal vessels and 1,408 sailors as of 2015, the highest numbers in Qatar. Al Thakhira, merged administratively with Al Khor, expanded its fishing port in 2021 with 69 new berths. Fishing boats still depart at dawn, selling catches at the souq, practicing skills inherited from the pearling era when reading tides and currents meant survival. This is commensalism at municipal scale: Al Khor benefits from proximity to Ras Laffan's wealth—jobs, infrastructure, metro connection via the Gold Line under construction—without being absorbed into the industrial complex. The energy sector operates like a whale that Al Khor rides alongside, extracting advantage from the association while maintaining distinct identity. Where Lusail was built from nothing and Al Wakrah metamorphosed entirely, Al Khor functioned as a refugium, a pocket where traditional fishing persisted even as the surrounding ecosystem industrialized. The Al Muhannadi founding imprinted a pattern that endures: this is a tribal settlement that became a municipality, not an oil company town. Workers commute north to Ras Laffan, then return home to Al Khor's slower rhythms. By 2026, Al Khor tests whether refugia can persist indefinitely or if industrialization eventually assimilates everything. If fishing culture survives another generation, Al Khor proves that proximity to energy giants doesn't require transformation. If the fishing fleet declines as younger generations choose offices over nets, it suggests refugia merely delay the inevitable—that oil wealth eventually homogenizes all of Qatar into variations on the same suburban-industrial pattern.