Cox's Bazar

Cox's Bazar is a coastal city in the far south-east of Bangladesh and the headquarters of the district and sadar upazila that share its name. It is run by a municipality called a pourashava, with 27 wards and 58 mahallas, and the 2022 census counted 196,385 people. The town stands on a coastal plain beside the Bay of Bengal, bounded on the north and east by the Bakkhali River, and is a fishing port best known as a tourism centre because of its long sandy beach. Its name honours Captain Hiram Cox, an East India Company officer who oversaw the settlement of Arakanese refugees here in the late eighteenth century, and a market was named after him. Cox's Bazar became a municipality in 1869, and since 2017 the surrounding district has hosted large Rohingya refugee camps.