Museums of the Gulf

The Gulf's museum landscape has shifted dramatically in a short space of time. Alongside long-established institutions, the region has opened or announced a wave of ambitious new museums — Zayed National Museum, the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum, and Saudi Arabia's Red Sea Museum among them — each making its own case for how heritage, history and contemporary culture should be presented to a global audience.

Qatar Museums continues to set a high bar for ambitious, socially engaged programming, while smaller institutions like the Sharjah Archaeology Museum and Al Shindagha Museum offer a more intimate, locally rooted counterpoint to the headline openings — proof that the region's museum story isn't only being written at the mega-project scale.

This page brings together our coverage of museums across the Gulf and wider region — new openings, major exhibitions, and practical visiting guides — so you can see what's worth planning a trip around.