1 Rial - Qaboos Barka Fort

Barka Fort, built in the seventeenth century and extensively restored in the 1990s under an Omani government heritage program, sits on the Al Batinah coast northwest of Muscat. The restoration effort was ongoing at virtually the same moment this coin was struck, making the issue a near-contemporaneous document of that conservation push rather than a retrospective one. Sultan Qaboos's systematic rehabilitation of pre-modern Omani fortifications — dozens of them — was one of the more deliberate nation-building programs of his reign, funded substantially by oil revenues that simply did not exist a generation earlier.