Raja Ampat, or the Four Kings, is an archipelago located off of the northwest tip of Bird's Head Peninsula (on the island of New Guinea), Southwest Papua province, Indonesia.

The Raja Ampat archipelago straddles the equator and forms part of the Coral Triangle, an area of Southeast Asian seas containing the richest marine biodiversity on earth.

Thousands of species of marine organisms, from the tiniest cleaner shrimp and camouflaged pygmy seahorses to the majestic cetaceans and whale sharks, thrive in these waters.

[4] At this time, Misool and Salawati were connected to New Guinea, while Waigeo and Batanta formed an island called Waitanta.

[5] At the Mololo Cave site, excavations show that early people were processing tree resins and hunting native animals.

[6] Pottery-making communities moved into Raja Ampat about 3500–3000 years ago and may have brought Austronesian languages to the area.

In another version, the fifth egg hatched into a woman (Pin Take) who later washed away to Biak, married Manar Makeri, and later gave birth to Gurabesi.

[9] The first recorded sighting and landing by Europeans of the Raja Ampat Islands was by the Portuguese navigator Jorge de Menezes and his crew in 1526, en route from Biak, the Bird's Head Peninsula, and Waigeo, to Halmahera (Ternate).

Islam first arrived in the Raja Ampat Islands in the 15th century due to political and economic contacts with the Bacan Sultanate.

[27] Diversity is considerably greater than any other area sampled in the Coral Triangle composed of Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and East Timor.

[27] The crown-of-thorns starfish eats Raja Ampat's corals, and the destruction this causes among reefs has posed a threat to tourism.

Raja Ampat's coral diversity, resilience, and role as a source for larval dispersal make it a global priority for marine protection.

[32] The submarine world around the islands was the subject of the documentary film Edies Paradies 3 (by Otto C. Honegger), which has been broadcast by the Swiss television network Schweizer Fernsehen.

[33] In March 2017 the 90-metre-long (295 ft) cruise ship Caledonian Sky owned by British tour operator Noble Caledonia got caught in a low tide and ran aground in the reef.

However, the West Papua province as a whole has a larger Muslim population because of its extensive history with the Sultanate of Tidore.

Raja Ampat Regency is subdivided into the following districts (kecamatan): Note: (a) including the Boo Islands, which lie some distance to the west of Kofiau.