Riyadh_Province
Riyadh Province
Administrative region of Saudi Arabia
The Riyadh Province (Arabic: منطقة الرياض Manṭiqat ar-Riyāḍ), also known as the Riyadh Region, is a province of Saudi Arabia, located in the geographic center of the country and the center of the Arabian Peninsula. It has an area of 404,240 km2 (156,080 sq mi) and with a 2022 population of 8,591,748,[2] it is the second-largest region by area, behind the Eastern Province and the largest by population. The capital governorate of the province is the Riyadh Governorate and it is named after the capital of the kingdom, Riyadh, which is the most populous city in the region and the kingdom, with a little less than two-thirds of the population of the region residing within the city. The province was governed for nearly five decades by Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz from 1963 to 2011 shortly before he became the Crown Prince in 2012. Currently, it is governed by Prince Faisal bin Bandar.
Other populous cities in the region include Al Ghat, Dawadmi, Afif, Zulfi and Majma'ah. Approximately half of the region's area is desert, and it only borders other regions of the kingdom; it has no international borders. The region borders, clockwise from the north, the Eastern Province, Najran Region, 'Asir Region, Mecca Region, Medina Region and the Al-Qassim Region. It is one of the 7 regions of the kingdom that do not have a coastline.
