Oman document photos online

In 1958, Oman did something almost no nation ever does with its own territory: it sold a piece of it. For about US$3 million (then roughly £3 million), Sultan Said bin Taimur handed Pakistan the coastal enclave of Gwadar, a Balochistan strip Oman had governed for nearly two centuries from the days of its Indian Ocean empire. That same empire once stretched all the way to Zanzibar, and in 1840 Oman's sultan moved his capital from Muscat to an African island. Today the same state that traded away coastlines issues one of the world's most distinctive identity documents, backed by the planet's third most valuable currency.

• Passport power In the July 2025 Henley Passport Index, Oman climbed four places to 56th, granting its citizens visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 88 destinations worldwide.
• E-passport Oman rolled out an ICAO-compliant biometric e-passport in 2015, embedding a contactless microchip with the holder's digital fingerprints, photo and electronic signature, and extended adult validity to ten years.
• Currency The Omani rial is split not into 100 cents but into 1,000 baisa, and pegged at 1 rial = US$2.6008 it ranks as the world's third most valuable currency, behind only the Kuwaiti and Bahraini dinars.
• Money history Before the rial, Oman's coastal trade ran on Indian rupees and silver Maria Theresa thalers; the modern Omani rial only arrived in 1972, replacing the short-lived Saidi rial.
• Sold territory In 1958 Oman sold the port of Gwadar to Pakistan for about US$3 million, surrendering a coastal enclave on the Arabian Sea it had ruled since the era of its maritime empire.
• African capital At its height Oman's empire reached Zanzibar off East Africa, and in 1840 Sultan Said bin Sultan moved his capital from Muscat to the African island of Zanzibar.
• Sealed succession Sultan Qaboos, the Arab world's longest-reigning modern ruler, never publicly named an heir; after his death in 2020 the royal family opened a sealed envelope in which he had secretly recorded his chosen successor.
• Frankincense Oman's Dhofar region is a UNESCO-listed Land of Frankincense, where the rare Boswellia sacra tree still yields luban prized since antiquity along trade routes that reached Mesopotamia, India and China.
• Demographics At the end of 2024 Oman's population reached 5.27 million, of whom about 43 percent were expatriates, with Bangladeshis the single largest foreign community at over 637,000.