Riyadh Province
The Riyadh Province 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 and with a 2022 population of 8,591,748, 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 Province, ʽAsir Province, Mecca Province, Medina Province and the Al-Qassim Province. It is one of the seven regions of the kingdom that do not have a coastline.