It is surrounded by high mountains of Golija and Rogozno, and by Pester plateau. The total area of the municipality with 100 inhabited places is 742 km2. Its founder Isa-beg Ishakovic rose the city close to the medieval fortress Targoviste, known as Ras. The first written document that mentions the name of Novi Pazar dates from the fifteenth century, when a Little Council of Dubrovnik Republic decided to appoint him his consul. Many travelers wrote about Novi Pazar, and famous Evliya Çelebi in the seventeenth century noted that it was one of the largest cities in the Balkans. Name of Novi Pazar entered the world of lexicon as a synonym for Sandzak from 1878, when the Congress of Berlin as a corpus separatum called the entire region Novpazarski Sandzak.

POPULATION - According to official census from 1991., Novi Pazar has 85,583 inhabitants.The ethnic composition of the population is: Serbs with 22:36%, Bosniaks with 75.37%, Montenegrins with 0.27%, Albanians with 0.25%, and 1.75% of others. According to the Red Cross and NGO, there are about 6,000 people displaced from Kosovo, refugees from Macedonia, Bosnia and Croatia. According to unofficial data, Novi Pazar today has over 120,000 inhabitants. It is a vast mountainous territory, where mild and sharp climbs optimaly alternate, there are river gorges and valleys, plateaus, large complexes of coniferous forests, large meadows and pastures, and the space has an extremely rich flora and fauna, abundance of clean water, thermal and mineral resources (Novopazarska and Rajcinovica spa, and Slatinski and Dezevska sorrels). With nature and human resources, as well as numerous cultural monuments, Novi Pazar has great potential for sustainable development - the production of healthy food and the development of all forms of tourism.

CULTURAL MONUMENTS - Novi Pazar had a rich and turbulent past. The special value of this multi-ethnic and multicultural area, where Western and Eastern civilizations encounted, are numerous cultural and historical monuments. Archaeological finds show that this area had been inhabited since the Stone Age – Naprelje site, through the Iron Age - Smolucka cave site from early antique age - Novi Pazar finding, finds of remains of late antique and medieval fortifications Jelec and Ras. Among the most significant cultural-historical monuments certainly is Peter Church built in the X century. For Peter's Church are related many important developments in the earlier history of medieval Raska, where Great Raska Zupan Stefan Nemanja received orthodoxy. There are Djurdjevi Stupovi, the foundation of Stefan Nemanja from the XII century; Sopocani, founded by King Uros I in the XIII century (preserved in the interior of the monastery is the most precious gallery of Raska and Byzantine fresco painting); City fortress with a guardian tower from the fifteenth century built on the orders of the founders of Isa-beg Ishakovic; Altuna-Alem mosque from the sixteenth century, the work of famous builders Muslihudin Abdulganij; Amir-aga’s Han (konak) from the seventeenth century, Hamam (bath) from the fifteenth century, the legacy of Isa-beg Ishakovic, founder of the city.