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Capital: Abuja
Population: 235 million+
Language: English (with over 500 languages, such as Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo)
1 – Cross River National Park
(Kwa Falls – above)
Cross River National Park, in the humid, mountainous south-east of Nigeria, protects the country’s largest surviving rainforest, part of the Guinean Forests of West Africa biodiversity hotspot, in Cross River State, where the Irish Kiltegan Fathers began their first missions in the 1930s.
The forests of Cross River National Park shelter forest elephants, chimpanzees and the rare drill among a rich array of primates, while the Kwa Falls tumble through a narrow gorge into a deep plunge pool.
The Okwangwo division of Cross River National Park is a refuge of the Cross River gorilla, the world’s rarest gorilla, with fewer than 300 surviving in scattered pockets of the Nigeria–Cameroon border forests, so elusive that they are almost never seen.
2 – Yankari National Park
Yankari National Park, in the savanna woodlands of Bauchi State in north-eastern Nigeria, spreads along the Gaji River and holds Nigeria’s largest remaining elephant herd, one of the most important in West Africa.
Game drives at Yankari turn up elephants, buffalo, baboons, waterbuck, hartebeest and hippos, and more than 300 kinds of bird have been recorded in the park.
The jewel of Yankari is the Wikki Warm Spring, where clear water wells up at about 31°C all year round, forming a natural swimming pool that pours some 21 million litres a day into the Gaji River.
3 – Zuma Rock
Zuma Rock, near Madalla in Niger State just west of Abuja, is a colossal monolith of igneous rock rising about 300 m above the surrounding plain, sometimes called the “Gateway to Abuja”.
The weathered flanks of Zuma Rock are said to resemble a giant face, and by tradition the local Gbagyi people used the rock as a refuge in times of war and believed spirits lived within it.
Zuma Rock is so iconic that it appears on the back of Nigeria’s 100-naira note, issued in December 1999.
4 – Oguta Lake
Oguta Lake, in Imo State in south-eastern Nigeria, is the largest natural lake in the state, formed when river sediment dammed the lower Njaba River, and sacred to the Oguta people, whose lake goddess is Uhamiri, also called Ogbuide.
During the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70 Biafran forces used Oguta Lake as a marine base, and the famine in Biafra led John and Kay O’Loughlin Kennedy to found Africa Concern, later Concern Worldwide, in Dublin in 1968, while Irish missionaries ran a night airlift of food into Biafra.
Where the brown Urashi River meets the green waters of Oguta Lake the two run side by side without mixing, which local lore explains as a quarrelling husband and wife who refuse to meet.
5 – Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove
The Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, on the edge of the city of Osogbo in south-western Nigeria, is a dense forest along the Osun River, the home of Osun, the Yoruba goddess of fertility and the river, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005.
One of the last sacred forests of Yorubaland, the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove is filled with shrines and more than 40 sculptures, many made with the Austrian artist Susanne Wenger, who became a Yoruba priestess and devoted her life to saving the grove.
Each August the Osun-Osogbo Festival draws thousands of worshippers, among them followers of the Yoruba-rooted faiths of the Americas, where Osun is honoured as Oxum in Brazil’s Candomblé and as Ochún in Cuba’s Santería.
6 – Benin City
Benin City was the capital of the Kingdom of Benin, ruled by its Oba from a palace at the heart of a city ringed by vast earthen walls and moats, often counted among the largest earthworks ever built by hand.
On Igun Street in Benin City the brass-casters’ guild, once the highest-ranked of some 50 palace guilds, works by the lost-wax method, a craft said to have reached Benin in the 13th century, though most of the famous plaques date from the 16th and 17th centuries.
In February 1897 a British punitive expedition sacked Benin City, looting thousands of brass and ivory works, many auctioned to cover its costs and at first credited by Europeans to Portuguese or Egyptian makers, while in 2021 the National Museum of Ireland announced it would return its 21 Benin objects.
7 – Kano
Kano, the great city of the Hausa north, was walled from the 11th century and grew rich on trade across the Sahara, becoming an emirate within the Sokoto Caliphate in the early 19th century.
Stretches of the old walls of Kano survive, enclosing the Emir’s palace, Gidan Rumfa, which dates from the 15th century, and Dala Hill, site of the city’s first settlement, rising above the rooftops.
The Kofar Mata dye pits in Kano, said to date from 1498, are worked by hand, cloth dipped in indigo and beaten to a blue-black sheen, a craft practised here for more than 500 years.
8 – Lagos
Lagos, one of Africa’s largest cities, began as a Yoruba settlement on islands in a lagoon, grew into a slave-trading port, was bombarded by the British in 1851 and annexed as a crown colony in 1861, and was Nigeria’s capital until Abuja took over in 1991.
Freedom Park in Lagos, opened in 2010, stands on the site of the colonial Broad Street Prison, whose inmates included the nationalists Herbert Macaulay and Obafemi Awolowo, in the heart of the old city on Lagos Island.
Lagos is the home of Nollywood, and in 2009 a UNESCO survey counted 872 Nigerian films made in a single year, more than the United States and second only to India.