Davao Occidental, officially the Province of Davao Occidental, is a province in the Philippines located in the Davao Region in Mindanao. Its capital is the municipality of Malita. To the east lies Davao Gulf. It also shares a maritime border with the Indonesian province of North Sulawesi to the south.
The main industries in Davao Occidental are aquaculture and agriculture. Economic produce in the province include fish, bananas and coconuts which are then exported to several major cities within southern Mindanao, including Davao City. Rice farms are only limited to the few flat lands in the province due to its mountainous and thickly forested nature.
The capital town of Malita is the province's main commercial hub.
Tourism has started to gain traction in the province, with potential tourist destinations mostly concentrated in the province's coastal beaches and the Sarangani and Balut islands in the south.
Davao Occidental was part of a Sultanate of Maguindanao but for the Sarangani, it was later became part of Buayan Sultanate.
What is now Davao Occidental was once a part of the now-defunct Davao Province which encompasses the entirety of present-day Davao Region. Section 1 of Philippine Commission Act No. 164 dated December 10, 1904 indicated that much of its area as far as what is now Malita once belonged to the municipality of Santa Cruz. The original chief inhabitants of the area were the indigenous Lumad tribes including the Matigsalugs and Tagakaulos. Around the early 1900s onward, migrants from Luzon and the Visayas settled in the area, many of whom intermarried with the indigenous people; as decades progressed the descendants of the migrants became the majority of the population.
The municipality of Malita was founded on November 13, 1936 per Proclamation No. 64 signed by President Manuel Quezon. It was the first town to be established in the area of what is now Davao Occidental and would later serve as its provincial capital. More towns in the area are established later: Trinidad (now Jose Abad Santos) in 1948, Sta Maria in 1968, Don Marcelino in 1979, and Sarangani in 1980.
On May 8, 1967, Davao Province was split into three provinces, one of them being Davao del Sur which included the municipalities of what would later comprise Davao Occidental.