Welcome to Banaadir!
Banaadir (Somali: Banaadir, Arabic: بنادر, Italian: Benadir) is an administrative region (gobol) in southeastern Somalia. It covers the same area as the city of Mogadishu, which serves as the capital. It is bordered to the northwest by the Shabelle river, and to the southeast by the Indian Ocean. Although by far the smallest administrative region in Somalia, it has the largest population, estimated at 3,650,227 (including 369,288 internally displaced persons) in 2014. The territorial extent and scope of the term Benadir has varied in definition throughout its history, with medieval usage extending Benadir to huge swaths of coast adjacent to Mogadishu stretching as far as hundreds of miles. The early modern period extended the meaning of Benadir to the interior midway towards the Hirshabelle region, to the contemporary period wherein sometimes the nonstandard misnomer of usage is interchangeable with the city of Mogadishu. This Banaadir municipality is bordered to the north by Hirshabelle and to the southwest by South West and is the only Somali gobol (administrative region) that is both a municipality and a gobol known as a region.