The Old Palace (Palace of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani)

The Old Palace is the early 20th-century home of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani, ruler of Qatar from 1913 to 1949, restored at the centre of the National Museum of Qatar at the southern end of the Doha Corniche. It is seen on a museum ticket, and 30 to 45 minutes in the palace fits inside a two- to three-hour museum visit.

The palace stands at the southern end of the Doha Corniche. Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani, who ruled Qatar from 1913 to 1949, built it in the early 20th century as his family residence. Its low courtyard buildings of local stone and plaster reflect how the ruling family lived in Doha before the oil era.

Plans drawn up in 1972 turned the palace into the core of a national museum, which opened on 23 June 1975. The museum received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1980.

When a new National Museum of Qatar was planned, the palace was kept at its centre. The Berlin firm ZRS Architekten Ingenieure restored it, and the building was refurbished in 2015. The French architect Jean Nouvel designed the new museum around it as a cluster of interlocking discs inspired by the desert rose, a crystal formation found in the Qatari desert. The new building opened on 28 March 2019.

Visitors walk through the palace's courtyards, arched verandas and rooms as part of the museum visit, while the main galleries around it run roughly in time order from Qatar's natural history to the discovery of oil and the modern state.

The palace is entered on a National Museum of Qatar ticket, with free entry for some resident and child categories; check current prices on the Qatar Museums website. Weekday mornings are the quietest, and the palace courtyards are most pleasant before the midday heat. Allow at least two to three hours for the whole museum, including the palace.

The museum is closed on Tuesdays, and on other days the listed hours start at 9:00, with last entry 45 minutes before closing. National Museum station on the Doha Metro Red Line is a 400 m walk, and there is on-site parking. The museum building is step-free with lifts, while parts of the historic palace have thresholds and uneven floors. A restaurant, cafés, a gift shop and a cloakroom are inside, and Souq Waqif and the Museum of Islamic Art are each about 1.5 km away.

Qatar Museums lists the hours as 9:00 to 19:00 on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Wednesday, 9:00 to 21:00 on Thursday and 13:30 to 19:00 on Friday, with Tuesday closed. Residents of Qatar and visitors under 16 enter free. When Qatar Museums last revised its prices, in May 2023, it set the non-resident adult ticket for the National Museum at QAR 50, with non-resident students paying QAR 25; confirm the current price on the booking page. For about a decade the palace was both the ruler's home and the seat of government, and when it opened as the Qatar National Museum in 1975 the complex also held a Museum of the State, a lagoon and a popular marine aquarium.