Story

Batam, officially the City of Batam or Batam City (not to be confused with Batam Kota, a district within this city), is the largest city in the Indonesian province of the Riau Islands.

The city of Batam includes Batam Island at, as well as other major islands such as Rempang at and Galang at. Together, the three-interconnected islands of the Riau Archipelago are known as Barelang (an abbreviation of Batam–Rempang–Galang). The remaining hundreds of tiny islands are largely conservation areas, small fishing outposts, or uninhabited mangroves. Collectively, the land area of all these islands make up around. Batam Island is the core urban and industrial zone, while both Rempang Island and Galang Island maintain their rural character and low-density population; they are connected to Batam Island by short bridges. Bulang Island and the islands to its north lie to the west of Batam Island; while they are part of the Belakang Padang District, they are also administratively within the city.

Batam City is an industrial boomtown, an emerging transport hub and part of a free trade zone in the Indonesia–Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle, located off Singapore's south coast. According to Statistics Indonesia's 2020 census, Batam had a municipal population of 1,196,396, making it the third largest city in the region of Sumatra, after Medan and Palembang. Islands that form part of Batam are also the closest parts of Indonesia to Singapore, at a minimum distance of across the Singapore Strait. In clear weather and good visibility, both Batam and Singapore are visible from each other with the naked eye. Batam was the fastest-growing municipality in Indonesia during the decade prior to 2010, with a population growth rate of 11% per year; however, there were setbacks during the subsequent decade. In 2017, the island suffered severe job losses; some 300,000 workers were laid off. The official estimated population as of mid 2025 was 1,296,960.

Today, Batam is inhabited by a heterogeneous mixture of people due to labor migration and desire to be close to Singapore; it is very diverse, two-thirds of the population are migrants. The predominant ethnicities are Malays, Javanese, Batak, Minangkabau, and Chinese. The indigenous people of Batam who are related to the Malays are the Orang Laut who are nomads who depend on the sea for their livelihood and the Orang Darat who live nomadically in the interior forests of Rempang whose population is threatened with extinction. As a municipality it exemplifies the national motto of "Bhinneka Tunggal Ika" (Unity in Diversity). The location of Batam, which is close to Singapore, is conducive to the development of economic, sociopolitical, and cultural aspects of the local community.

Indonesian is the common lingua franca of Batam in daily use. Other languages such as local Malay (similar to the Malaysian standard as spoken in neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore) since both varieties coexist with each other as the former is the official and national language widely spoken and used like in the rest of Indonesia whilst the latter is a trade language and widely spoken by Malaysian Malay expatriates from Johor, Malaysia as well as Malay Singaporeans from Singapore who reside for business purposes and also for historical purposes. Other ethnic minority languages such as Minangkabau, Batak, Javanese and Chinese ethnic dialects like Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew and Hainanese are also widely used owing to the city's ethnolinguistic diversity in addition to the dominant ethnic Malay populace. The usage of Mandarin and English are trending due to Singaporean influence, especially by expatriates living in Batam.

Harbor view with oil tanks from Shell at Sambu Island, 1936 The first recorded inhabitants at Batam Island are the Malays known as the Orang Laut, from the year 231 CE. Then the Orang Darat who are the remnants of the pre-Malay population on the island of Batam and Rempang. The island group once served as the field of struggle of Admiral Hang Nadim, against Portuguese invaders in the 16th century, and was utilised by the Indonesian government in the 1960s, who maintained a petroleum logistics base on Sambu Island, one of the minor islands in the Batam group of islands.

In the 1970s, according to Presidential Decree No. 41/1973, Batam Island was designated as a working environment of an industrial area supported by Batam Island Industrial Development Authority or better known as Batam Authority Board (BOB, now Batam Development Board ( or BP Batam) as the driving force for the development of Batam, with the initial aim of making Batam the "Indonesian version of Singapore". With the rapid development of the island, based on Government Regulation No. 34/1983, the Batam District (which is part of Riau Islands Regency) was upgraded to municipality status which has the duties to run government administration and society and support the development of BP Batam.

In the Indonesian Reformation era in the late 1990s, with Act No. 53/1999, the Batam administrative municipality changed its status to an autonomous region, namely Batam City Government to carry out governmental and developmental functions by involving BP Batam.

Batam is a roughly oval island with many bays, islets, and peninsulas, located west of Bintan Island, south of Singapore, north of Rempang Island and Galang Island, and east of Bulang Island. The Singapore Strait separates Singapore and Batam, while the Riau Strait separates Batam and Bintan island. Batam Municipality covers 3,869 km2, of which 1,020.28 km2 is land, a figure which includes some land reclamation. However, Barelang Island (not actually one but three, see above) covers roughly 715 km2 of that 1,020.28 km2, and Batam island itself covers only about 410 km2 out of the total. The bulk of the municipal population resides on Batam Island.

Batam has a tropical rainforest climate (Af) with heavy rainfall year-round.