Batken is situated in the extreme South West of the Republic, and consists of four mountainous regions, with altitudes ranging from 400 to 5621m asl. The oblast was created in 1999.
The administrative center is the town of Batken. The oblast includes a number of enclaves belonging to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, created when the borders of the republics were settled by a commission of the Soviet Union in the time of Joseph Stalin. There are seven enclaves altogether — some very small, not much more than the size of a farm. The largest is the Sokh enclave which belongs to Uzbekistan.
The region is not very well known and most tourists tend to come from within Kyrgyzstan itself or the surrounding republics. There are a number of tour-bases around the oblast, (Pyramida-Dolina in the Batken region, Ak-Suu, and Ozgorush in the Laylak region, and Dugaba in the Kadamjaiski region) which have been host to a number of international mountaineering expeditions.
There are a number of sites of antiquity scattered throughtout the oblast.
