Purple Island

This guide to Purple Island north of Doha follows a three-thousand-year-old dye industry, where fishermen and pearl divers once cracked open thousands of murex sea snails to draw out the deep red-purple later prized as Tyrian purple, a color reserved for the robes of kings. It traces how the island got its name and follows the mangrove ecosystem that has grown up over the vanished dye works, home to crabs, small fish, and migrating Greater flamingos arriving from as far as Siberia.