AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Quoin Island is the rugged heart of the Quoin Islands — a trio of bare, wind-scoured rocks that form the northernmost point of Oman, sitting in the Strait of Hormuz where the Gulf of Oman narrows into the Persian Gulf. Local Shihuh fishermen know them as As Salamah wa Banatiha, "Salamah and her daughters": the great western rock (Mumar, or Great Quoin), a small middle islet (Fanaku, or Gap Island), and a low eastern stone (Didamar, or Little Quoin) that flies a white lighthouse built more than a century ago.↗
This is not a resort beach or an easy day-trip landing — the islands are uninhabited and exposed, in the middle of one of the world's busiest shipping lanes. For most travelers, Quoin Island appears on the horizon from a Musandam dhow cruise or a Strait-of-Hormuz liveaboard, a dark triangular headland on the skyline and a signal that they have reached the very edge of the Arabian landmass.↗↗
Oman's last piece of land
The archipelago sits in open water north of the Musandam Peninsula, the finger of rock that Oman clings to across the Strait from Iran. The western island, Mumar — Great Quoin, the rock the Maps pin marks — is the biggest of the three: a triangular lump of stone roughly 770 metres long, up to 530 metres across, rising some 164 metres out of the sea. To its east lies the slim gap of Fanaku, and beyond that low Didamar, only 51 metres high but home to the cluster's defining structure. Together they are the last Omani ground before the channel opens toward Iran's islands and the deep Gulf beyond.
