Khanh Hoa

Geography

The province lies at the southern end of the Trường Sơn range, where mountains reach the coast and leave only narrow coastal plains; Vietnamese Wikipedia describes the terrain as mostly hills and low mountains with an average elevation of about 60 m^[1]. Its three great bays, Vân Phong in the north, Nha Trang in the centre and Cam Ranh in the south, are sheltered by peninsulas and hold most of the province's roughly 200 coastal islands^[1]. Mũi Đôi, on the Hòn Gốm peninsula in the far north-east, is the easternmost point of mainland Vietnam^[1].

Vietnamese Wikipedia names Hòn Giao, at 2,062 m in Nam Khánh Vĩnh commune, as the province's highest peak, while a separate passage in the same article and the infobox of English Wikipedia instead give 2,051 m for a summit called Chư H'Mư in the Vọng Phu range on the border with Đắk Lắk; the two figures do not agree on which peak is highest^[1][4]. The Cái river of Nha Trang runs 79 km from the mountains through Khánh Vĩnh, Diên Khánh and Nha Trang to the sea, and the Dinh river drains a 985 km² basin through Ninh Hòa^[1]. Since the 2025 merger the province also includes the far drier terrain of the former Ninh Thuận in the south, described in its own article.

History

The region was part of the Cham principality of Kauthara, centred on the Po Nagar temple above the mouth of the Cái river at Nha Trang^[1]. In 1653 the Nguyễn lord Nguyễn Phúc Tần took the territory from Champa and organised it as Thái Khang dinh, later renamed Bình Hòa; in 1831, in the twelfth year of the Minh Mạng era, the Nguyễn court renamed it Khánh Hòa province^[1]. The French bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin lived in Nha Trang from the 1890s, founding the Pasteur Institute there, a date Vietnamese Wikipedia gives as 1891 and English Wikipedia's Yersin article as 1895, and died in the city in 1943^[1][8].

On 29 October 1975 Khánh Hòa was merged into Phú Khánh province together with three other units of the former Republic of Vietnam: Phú Yên province, the city of Nha Trang and the town of Cam Ranh, both of which were then administered separately from the provinces^[12]. Phú Yên and Khánh Hòa were separated again on 30 June 1989^[1][12]. The most recent change came in 2025: Resolution 202/2025/QH15 of 12 June 2025 merged the former Ninh Thuận province into Khánh Hòa, and Resolution 1667/NQ-UBTVQH15 of 16 June 2025 replaced every district-level unit with 65 communes, wards and the Trường Sa special zone, all effective from 1 July 2025^[2][5]. A fuller timeline appears in the dedicated history article.

The 2025 reform and former districts

Until 30 June 2025 the enlarged province's territory was divided among nine district-level units in the former Khánh Hòa and seven in the former Ninh Thuận, all of which the reform abolished^[5][9]. The table below shows what each became; a handful of new units also drew small areas across old district boundaries, described in the administrative divisions article.

Economy

In 2024 the former Khánh Hòa province alone recorded a GRDP of about 191,357,151 million VND, the 22nd highest among Vietnam's provinces and cities that year, with budget revenue of about 25,880,100 million VND (16th) and average income of 85.29 million VND a year (23rd)^[7]. Vietnamese Wikipedia's infobox instead gives a projected GRDP for the merged 2025 province of 209,342 billion VND (8.33 billion USD), a pre-merger estimate published in May and June 2025 that differs from the 2024 figure above because it covers a different year and, after 1 July 2025, a larger territory^[7][1].

Tourism is central to the economy: the former Khánh Hòa recorded more than 10.6 million visitor arrivals in 2024 (up 45.5 percent on 2023, and 17.8 percent above the target for total arrivals), among them about 4.5 million international arrivals, with revenue of nearly 52,272 billion VND, up 53.9 percent on 2023; the province set a 2025 target of 11.8 million arrivals and 60,000 billion VND in revenue^[10]. Shipbuilding, seafood processing and the Vân Phong and Cam Ranh economic zones are the other pillars of the former Khánh Hòa's economy, while the former Ninh Thuận contributes grapes, salt, shrimp hatcheries and a growing wind and solar power industry, detailed in the economy and Ninh Thuận articles^[1][11].

Demographics

Vietnamese Wikipedia lists the main ethnic groups of the former Khánh Hòa as Kinh, Ra Glai, Hoa, Cơ Ho and Chăm, giving undated counts of 1,095,981 Kinh and 45,915 Ra Glai, the largest minority, concentrated in Khánh Sơn and Khánh Vĩnh, with smaller numbers of Cơ Ho, Ê Đê, Hoa, Tày and Nùng and about 290 Chăm; the total is close to the province's 2009 population, though the page does not itself state a census year^[1]. At the 2019 census the same area recorded 265,316 people with a religious affiliation, the largest groups being Catholic (132,992) and Buddhist (100,560)^[1]. Figures for the enlarged province, including the former Ninh Thuận's much larger Chăm population, appear in the demographics article.

The Trường Sa special zone is administered by Vietnam as part of Khánh Hòa; the surrounding Trường Sa (Spratly) Islands are also claimed in whole or in part by China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei, and this article, like the rest of the site, states only who administers what^[1].