The Old Palace at NMoQ
Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim's early twentieth-century residence — restored heart of the National Museum of Qatar.
The Old Palace was built in the early twentieth century by Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani, father of modern Qatar, and served for around a decade as the ruler's home and seat of government. In 1975 it became the original Qatar National Museum — an adaptation that won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1980 — and now sits restored at the centre of Jean Nouvel's National Museum of Qatar.
The conservation set a regional benchmark for treating historic fabric within a contemporary museum: the palace is both exhibit and exhibit container, anchoring Nouvel's desert-rose galleries to a lived political history.
Exhibo editorial
Do not treat the palace as a separate ticket from NMoQ — it is the emotional core of the museum, and the contrast between mud-plaster rooms and Nouvel's steel petals is the whole story.
Allow time after the main galleries to sit in the palace courtyards; they are quieter than the headline halls.
How to find it
National Museum of Qatar, Corniche. Metro: National Museum (Gold Line). Museum hours apply; palace access included with NMoQ admission.
Similar places
All places
Related stories
Why Doha Is Full of Roundabouts
An old circle at a crossroads, sharpened by British road engineering, became the way an Arabian city found its way and remembered itself — and it took the bulldozers to reveal it.
In a city where a landmark was more useful than an address, Doha's roundabouts became its navigation, its landscaping and its national image all at once. Now they're being torn out for signalled junctions — and the affection for them arrived, as one scholar put it, only posthumously.
The Animal We Drew Everywhere Once It Was Gone
From Neolithic rock to airline tailfin — how the Arabian oryx vanished from the desert, came back from nine animals, and multiplied everywhere as a symbol in the very decades it was gone.
The last wild Arabian oryx was shot in 1972. By then it was already a picture — carved on Bronze Age tombs, mistaken by the ancients for a unicorn, praised by poets as the eyes of the beloved. This is the story of an animal that went extinct in the wild and was brought back from nine survivors, and of the strange gap between the creature and the emblem it became: fast, sharp and ascendant on a nation's tailfin, while the animal itself survives by standing still in the shade.
Seventy Thousand Solomons: The Empire That Performed a Legend
A demon catalogue in the conqueror's library, a sixteenth-century text where kingship is an office held seventy thousand times, and the columns a sultan dragged across three provinces to prove he held it.
Mehmed II kept a Greek catalogue of demons in his library at Topkapı. Seventy years later a sultan named for a prophet was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and hauling Roman columns out of Egypt and the Lebanon into a mosque above the Golden Horn. In between, Ottoman writers turned Solomon from a warning into a job — and the empire applied for it in stone.
