Salalah’s two economies — and the plan to make them one

For decades, Salalah’s economy has followed two different calendars.
One arrives with Khareef, the annual monsoon season that turns Dhofar’s mountains green and draws families seeking relief from the Gulf summer. For several weeks, apartments fill, restaurants become busier and shops, roads and visitor sites operate at seasonal intensity.
The other never waits for the rain. It moves through the Port of Salalah, Salalah Free Zone and Salalah Airport, linking southern Oman to international shipping routes, manufacturing supply chains and overseas markets throughout the year.
These two economies already overlap, but not as fully as they could. The Greater Salalah Structure Plan — a long-term framework for guiding land use, infrastructure and investment to 2040 — asks whether tourism, trade and the everyday city can be connected more effectively.
That is the deeper economic story behind a document that might otherwise look like a long list of roads, districts, transport links and projects.
Developed under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning and presented to stakeholders in Salalah, the framework seeks to organise future growth so that the city’s economic assets reinforce one another instead of developing as separate islands.
BEYOND A SEASONAL CITY
Khareef is not presented as a problem to be replaced. It remains one of Salalah’s strongest competitive advantages and one of Oman’s most distinctive tourism products.
But the framework identifies the concentration of visitor activity in a short season as an economic and infrastructure challenge. By its account, the city’s population more than triples during Khareef, sharply increasing demand for accommodation, roads, parking, utilities and public services. Outside the peak, some businesses face a much thinner market.
The plan therefore calls for a move beyond “Khareef-only” tourism towards a year-round offer built around heritage, the coast, mountains, agriculture, nature and events.
The distinction matters. Extending tourism across more months is not simply about increasing visitor numbers. A longer season could help businesses retain staff, use assets more efficiently and develop services that are not dependent on one narrow climate window.
A hotel, restaurant or tour operator serving customers for much of the year has a different business model from one relying heavily on several crowded weeks.
Tourism, however, is only one part of the proposed diversification. The framework places it alongside logistics, manufacturing, agriculture, business services, education, healthcare, retail and knowledge-based activity.
Salalah is therefore being planned not as a tourism city with an industrial zone attached, but as a city expected to draw growth from several economic engines.
FROM GATEWAYS TO AN ECONOMIC PLATFORM
Salalah already possesses infrastructure that many cities would struggle to assemble: a major container port, a free zone, an international airport and proximity to important maritime routes.
Yet infrastructure alone does not guarantee that the surrounding city captures a greater share of the value it generates.
Cargo can pass through a port without creating enough local manufacturing. An airport can move passengers without producing a substantial aviation-services economy. An industrial zone can attract factories while remaining disconnected from research, housing, public transport and local suppliers.
The framework’s response is closer spatial and economic integration. It proposes bringing the port, free zone and airport together as a logistics and manufacturing hub, while improving their links with the urban core, employment centres and new development areas.
It identifies a proposed Airport City logistics hub, an Innovation District and a pharmaceutical precinct at Raysut alongside the Port and Free Zone.
Each has a distinct role. The airport hub is intended to support logistics and higher-value exports. The pharmaceutical precinct would bring together production, distribution and healthcare-related activity. The Innovation District is envisaged as a link between research, universities, mixed-use development and commercial activity. The port and free zone would remain anchors for industrial and trade-related investment.
Taken together, the aim is to build an economic chain within one urban region: research, production, logistics, export and supporting services.
Whether that model succeeds will depend less on the quality of the maps than on the quality of implementation.
Businesses invest where land, infrastructure, regulation, skills and markets work together. Drawing investment clusters is only the first step.

THE CITY AS PRODUCTIVE INFRASTRUCTURE
One of the more important ideas in the structure plan is that urban quality and economic competitiveness are not separate agendas.
Housing, public transport, public spaces and environmental protection may appear secondary beside ports and factories. In practice, they influence whether workers can reach jobs, whether companies can recruit talent and whether investors view a city as a place in which to establish long-term operations.
The framework promotes compact development, mixed-use neighbourhoods and closer alignment between housing, employment and transport.
Greater Salalah’s population is projected to rise from about 379,000 to approximately 613,000 by 2040. At the same time, the presentation says 42 per cent of residential plots remain undeveloped, despite the city’s outward spread. About two-thirds of trips are already made by private car.
That creates an important economic choice.
Salalah can continue expanding across new land, extending roads, water, electricity, sewerage and public services over greater distances. Or it can use more of the vacant and underused land already within the city, concentrating growth where infrastructure and services can be provided more efficiently.
The plan favours the second approach, supported by a proposed urban growth boundary, infill development and more mixed-use, transit-oriented growth.
This is not simply an urban-design preference. Dispersed cities cost more to operate. Longer journeys increase congestion, infrastructure networks become more expensive to extend and viable public transport becomes harder to provide.
Compact growth does not mean crowding every neighbourhood. It means matching development more closely with the infrastructure, jobs and services required to support it.
THE ENVIRONMENT IS NOT EMPTY LAND
Salalah’s agricultural belt, wadis, khawrs and coastline are often discussed as natural or tourism assets. The structure plan also treats them as part of the city’s economic infrastructure.
Wadis provide drainage and flood protection. Agricultural land supports production, landscape identity and potential visitor activity. Public beaches and green spaces contribute to quality of life and tourism. Khawrs and coastal ecosystems protect biodiversity and help define the city’s character.
Poorly managed expansion could weaken the assets on which parts of Salalah’s economy depend.
The plan therefore combines growth controls with proposals for wadi buffers, coastal resilience, green corridors and protection of agricultural and ecologically sensitive areas.
The economic principle is straightforward: development that damages natural protection systems may create immediate land value but impose higher costs later through flooding, erosion, environmental loss or weaker tourism appeal.
The test will be whether environmental safeguards remain firm when they conflict with short-term development pressure.
RO 4.3 BILLION IS A REQUIREMENT, NOT THE STRATEGY
The framework estimates that its proposed capital projects and technical assessments could require around RO 4.3 billion through 2040.
It identifies 261 proposed interventions — 114 capital projects and 147 technical assessments — and assumes an investment mix divided almost evenly between the public and private sectors.
The figure is a planning estimate, not approved expenditure or confirmed investment. Individual interventions would remain subject to financing, procurement, regulatory approval and implementation decisions.
The scale is substantial, but the headline number should not obscure the more important issue.
Spending RO 4.3 billion does not by itself create an integrated economy.
A road that does not improve access to jobs, an industrial district without skills or supporting suppliers, and a tourism project unable to attract demand outside Khareef may all be completed without delivering the wider transformation envisaged.
The value will come from sequencing: which infrastructure is built first, which investment clusters become commercially viable, and whether private capital follows the public groundwork.
Eng Aseela al Busaidi, Technical Director of the Greater Salalah Structure Plan at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning, captured that distinction in her closing remarks to the workshop.
“We are not dealing with separate projects, but with an integrated system in which every project supports the others and every investment creates added value for its surroundings,” she said.
The harder task is ensuring that each completed asset raises the usefulness and economic return of those around it.
THE REAL MEASURE
By 2040, success should not be measured only by kilometres of road built, investment announced or land developed.
It should be measured by whether businesses operate for more of the year; whether more goods passing through Salalah’s gateways are processed, manufactured or supported locally; and whether growth produces higher-value employment accessible to residents.
It should also be measured by whether the city preserves the natural systems and cultural identity that make it economically distinctive.
The framework provides the structure for that transition. It connects tourism with heritage and nature, logistics with manufacturing, urban growth with transport, and investment with environmental resilience.
But a plan can connect these elements on paper more easily than institutions can connect them in practice.
The Greater Salalah Structure Plan ultimately asks a simple economic question: can a city known internationally for one remarkable season build an economy that performs throughout the year?
The framework offers one possible answer. Whether it succeeds will depend not on the ambition of the maps, but on the discipline of implementation over the next 15 years.