Welcome to Karachi!
Karachi, the noisy, bustling, ever-growing troubled metropolis of Pakistan, lies on the eastern coast of the Arabian Sea, just northwest of the Indus river delta. The largest city, and unarguably the most important, Karachi was the original capital of the nation. The sprawling huge metropolis has grown into the commercial, transport, and political hub of the country, and operates the largest and busiest ports in the country. The growth rate of the city propels it forward onto the global stage and Karachi is on its way to becoming a massively influential player.
Karachi offers a remarkable variety of attractions and activities – from sunny, sandy beaches and scurf-infested old colonial buildings, still preserved and in some cases inhabited, to traditional bazaars and modern shopping malls. Upscale luxury hotels overlook modish restaurants with flavors from all over the nation and much of the world. They make the city a hotspot for local and tourist activity.
The remarkable skyline is but one of the wonderful attractions of the city, and this grand South Asian city holds many surprises for anyone who decides to seek them out. Karachi is home to over 23 million inhabitants, from all over the country and even abroad, and is a vibrant melting pot of cultures and ideas. Visitors will be met with a new and exciting experience around each corner, and on every visit. The city is known as the "City of the Quaid" because the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was born, raised and spent his last years here. Additionally, due to its round-the-clock liveliness, Karachi is now more popularly and affectionately referred to as the "City of Lights".
The most diverse and cosmopolitan city of Pakistan, Karachi lives and breathes with a style of its own. The most advanced city of the nation, it often blazes forward as an example of Pakistan to come, and because of its diverse makeup, is sometimes described as a mini-Pakistan, where you can find representatives of every Pakistani culture. Karachi is the third most populous city in the World and the largest in the Muslim world. Because of this and its melting pot nature, the pace of life is faster and the social attitudes more liberal than elsewhere in the nation, and the growth rate of the city makes it an evolving hub where people from different backgrounds meet and shape the future of the city and of Pakistan.
Karachi (Urdu: کراچی, Sindhi: ڪراچي, Balochi: کراچی) is the largest city in Pakistan and the twelfth-largest city in the world. It is the capital of the Pakistani province of Sindh. Ranked as a beta-global city, it is Pakistan's premier industrial and financial center, with an estimated GDP of $164 billion (PPP) as of 2019. Karachi is Pakistan's most cosmopolitan city, linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse, as well as one of Pakistan's most secular and socially liberal cities. With its location on the Arabian Sea, Karachi serves as a transport hub and is home to Pakistan's two largest seaports, the Port of Karachi and Port Bin Qasim, as well as Pakistan's busiest airport, the Jinnah International Airport. Though the region surrounding and in Karachi has been inhabited for millennia, the city was formally founded as the fortified village of Kolachi in 1729. The settlement drastically increased in importance with the arrival of the British East India Company in the mid-19th century. The British administration embarked on major projects to transform the city into a major seaport and connected it with its extensive railway network throughout the Indian subcontinent. At the time of the Partition of British India in 1947, the city was the largest in Sindh with an estimated population of 400,000 people. Following the independence of Pakistan, the city experienced a dramatic shift in population and demography with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from India, coupled with a substantial exodus of its Hindu residents, declining from 51.1 percent to 1.7 percent of the total population. The city experienced rapid economic growth following Pakistan's independence, attracting migrants from throughout the country and other regions in South Asia by extension. According to the 2017 national census, Karachi's total population was 16,051,521, with 14.9 million of that figure residing in the urban areas of the city proper. Karachi is one of the world's fastest-growing cities and has significant communities representing almost every ethnic group in Pakistan. Karachi is home to more than two million Bangladeshi immigrants, a million Afghan refugees, and up to 400,000 Rohingyas from Myanmar. Karachi is now Pakistan's premier industrial and financial center. The city has a formal economy estimated to be worth $114 billion as of 2014, which is the largest in the country. Karachi collects more than a third of Pakistan's tax revenue and generates approximately 20% of Pakistan's entire GDP. Approximately 30% of Pakistani industrial output is from Karachi, while Karachi's ports handle approximately 95% of Pakistan's foreign trade. Approximately 90% of the multinational corporations operating in Pakistan are headquartered in Karachi. Karachi is considered to be Pakistan's fashion capital and has hosted the annual Karachi Fashion Week since 2009. Known as the "City of Lights" in the 1960s and 1970s for its vibrant nightlife, Karachi was beset by sharp ethnic, sectarian, and political conflict in the 1980s with the large-scale arrival of weaponry during the Soviet-Afghan War. The city had become well known for its high rates of violent crime, but recorded crimes sharply decreased following a crackdown operation against criminals, the MQM political party, and Islamist militants, initiated in 2013 by the Pakistan Rangers. As a result of the operation, Karachi dropped from being ranked the world's 6th-most dangerous city for crime in 2014, to 115th by mid-2021.