Lagos
Nigeria's commercial capital and Africa's largest city
Lagos pours across a tangle of islands, lagoons and reclaimed sandbars on the Bight of Benin, a megacity expanding faster than almost any other on Earth. It is the commercial heart of Nigeria and, by most counts, the most populous urban area on the African continent, its metropolitan reach holding somewhere between seventeen and twenty million people. Traffic, music and money define its reputation: this is the home of Nollywood and Afrobeats, a place where street markets, container ports and gleaming new financial districts press against one another in restless, improvisational energy.
The city occupies the low, wet edge of the Atlantic coast, threaded by Lagos Lagoon and a network of creeks. Its terrain barely rises above sea level — the high point on Lagos Island is only about seven meters — which makes it acutely vulnerable to flooding and rising seas. Bridges stitch the islands of Lagos, Ikoyi and Victoria to the sprawling mainland districts of Ikeja, Surulere and beyond, while offshore the ambitious Eko Atlantic development rises on land reclaimed from the ocean behind a great sea wall.
Founded as a Yoruba settlement of the Awori people, who called it Eko, the site became a port for Portuguese traders who named it Lagos for its lagoons. It served as the capital of colonial and then independent Nigeria until 1991, when the seat of government moved inland to purpose-built Abuja. Lagos kept the commerce: its ports handle the bulk of the nation's seaborne trade, and its banks, tech startups and creative industries make it the economic motor of West Africa. The city's relentless growth, equal parts opportunity and strain, has become a defining story of twenty-first-century urban Africa.