Qatar gained a lot of attention in 2022 for hosting the World Cup. There’s more to Qatar than soccer stadiums though. Qatar occupies a desert-ridden peninsula that juts into the Persian Gulf between Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. While its desert are pretty uninhabitable, most of the country’s population live in the capital Doha, those landscapes of sand, and the natural gas and oil fields below the shifting dunes, have made Qatar one of the richest countries in the world. There’s a lot to be said for sand and in some cases, the more of it there is the better.