During the past decade, solving complex optimization problems with metaheuristic algorithms has received considerable attention among practitioners and researchers. Hence, many metaheuristic algorithms have been developed over the last years. Many of these algorithms are inspired by various phenomena of nature. In this paper, a new population based algorithm, the Lion Optimization Algorithm (LOA), is introduced. Special lifestyle of lions and their cooperation characteristics has been the basic motivation for development of this optimization algorithm. Some benchmark problems are selected from the literature, and the solution of the proposed algorithm has been compared with those of some well-known and newest meta-heuristics for these problems. The obtained results confirm the high performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison to the other algorithms used in this paper.