You don't just visit Lagos: you feel it. It's a megacity of overflowing energy, the largest in sub-Saharan Africa, a hive of more than fifteen million people spread between skyscraper-studded islands and a sprawling mainland. It's chaotic, noisy, hot and sometimes exhausting, but it's also one of the most creative cities on the planet: this is where the Afrobeats heard around the world comes from, along with Nollywood films —the second most prolific film industry on the globe— and an art, fashion and food scene that keeps on growing.
The city is split between the 'Mainland' (more working-class and authentic, with Yaba, Surulere and Ikeja) and the islands (Lagos Island, Ikoyi, Victoria Island and modern Lekki), home to the skyscrapers, luxury hotels, galleries and nightlife. Between them lies a large lagoon crossed by eternally jammed bridges. Lagos was Nigeria's capital until 1991 and is still its engine: if the country has a pulse, it beats here.
This guide takes a practical look at Lagos: what to see, from the art of Nike Gallery to the forest of Lekki Conservation Centre, how to spend an afternoon at the beach in Tarkwa Bay, where to eat a good 'jollof rice' or 'suya', how to enjoy an Afrobeat night at Fela Kuti's shrine and how to get around safely in such a giant. With patience and a good attitude, Lagos opens up and becomes one of the most intense and memorable urban experiences in Africa.
Lagos began as a settlement of Awori Yoruba fishermen on the islands of a lagoon, became a kingdom (Eko) under Benin influence and then a key port in the slave trade between the 17th and 19th centuries. The British bombarded and annexed it in 1861, made it the capital of their colony of Nigeria and ruled the country from there until independence in 1960, proclaimed at Lagos's Tafawa Balewa Square. It was the national capital until 1991, when the government moved to the planned city of Abuja, but Lagos kept growing into the megacity and cultural capital it is today. Its full history is told on our dedicated page.
Read the full history ↓Nigeria's creative heart: from the Yoruba island of Eko grew the megacity of Lagos, birthplace of afrobeats and Nollywood, in a land of sacred rocks and old slave ports.
Read the history of Lagos and the Yoruba southwest →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the name 'Lagos' existed, the islands and shores of this great Atlantic lagoon were home to fishermen and hunters of the Awori Yoruba people. According to tradition, they settled here around the 15th and 16th centuries, drawn by plentiful fishing and the natural protection the islands offered from the open sea. The main settlement was called 'Eko', a name Lagosians still proudly use for their city today.
Over time, Eko came under the influence of the powerful Kingdom of Benin to the east, which ruled over the area and left its mark on its political organisation. The word 'Eko' is in fact attributed to the Benin people, who set up a war camp and a seat of authority there. That period gave rise to the institution of the 'Oba' of Lagos, the city's traditional king, a line that survives to this day and still carries enormous symbolic weight.
The name 'Lagos' came with the Portuguese, the first Europeans to frequent this coast in the 15th century. They called the place 'Lago de Curamo' or simply 'Lagos' (Portuguese for 'lakes') because of its inland waters and islands, and in memory of the port town of Lagos in Portugal's Algarve. So, with Yoruba, Benin and Portuguese names layered on top of one another, the Awori fishing village became a strategic enclave on the coast of West Africa.
Between the 17th and 19th centuries, Lagos became one of the busiest ports of the Atlantic slave trade in the region known as the 'Slave Coast'. Its sheltered lagoon and its location made it a point of embarkation for thousands of Africans captured inland and sold to European traders (Portuguese, Brazilian and others) bound for the plantations of the Americas, above all in Brazil and the Caribbean. Local kings and merchants took an active part in this trade, which made the city's elite rich.
Nearby Badagry, to the west, and Lagos itself were hubs of that human tragedy for generations. When the British Empire abolished the slave trade in the 19th century and began pursuing it with its naval squadron in the Atlantic, Lagos remained a centre of the illegal slave trade. Along with its commercial interests, this gave London a pretext to intervene.
One unusual feature of this period was the 'Afro-Brazilians', or returnees: descendants of enslaved people freed in Brazil and Cuba who came back to Lagos from the mid-19th century onwards. They brought Brazilian architecture, surnames, religion and customs with them, and left a visible mark on the 'Brazilian Quarter' of Lagos Island, with its Brazilian colonial-style houses. That heritage is part of the city's unique cultural mix.
In 1851 the British navy bombarded Lagos in what became known as the 'Reduction of Lagos'. It deposed Oba Kosoko, who was linked to the slave trade, and installed a king friendly to British interests. Ten years later, in 1861, Britain formally annexed Lagos through the Treaty of Cession and made it a Crown colony. This was the first step in a British colonial expansion that, over the following decades, would spread across the whole of present-day Nigeria.
As a colony and then as the main port, Lagos grew fast. The British built docks, a railway to the interior and administrative buildings, and laid out a modern city across the islands. In 1914, when the northern and southern protectorates were merged to create the colony of Nigeria, Lagos was named capital of the new territory. The city filled with traders, civil servants and an emerging educated African elite who would play a key role in the country's politics.
In the first half of the 20th century, Lagos was the stage for Nigerian nationalism. Journalists, lawyers and trade unionists, many of them educated in the city, drove the movement first for self-government and then for independence. The Lagos press, political parties and cultural associations turned the city into the laboratory of modern Nigeria, while its population and economic weight kept growing.
On 1 October 1960, on the open ground now called Tafawa Balewa Square (then the Race Course), the British flag was lowered and Nigeria's new green-and-white flag was raised. The country had won its independence, and Lagos, as the capital, was at the heart of the celebrations. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa became the first head of government of independent Nigeria. The city was full of optimism, with modernisation projects and a lively cultural and political scene.
The years that followed, however, were turbulent for all of Nigeria: coups, the bloody Biafran civil war (1967-1970) and a series of military governments. As the capital and largest city, Lagos was the centre of power and also of the tensions. The oil boom of the 1970s filled the city with money, cars and construction, but also with congestion and unplanned growth that became legendary. In just a few decades its population shot up from a few hundred thousand to several million.
In 1976 the government decided to build a new capital at the geographic centre of the country, one more neutral between the regions and with room to grow: Abuja. The transfer of government functions was completed in 1991, when Abuja officially became the capital of Nigeria. Lagos lost the title but not its importance: it remained, by a huge margin, the country's largest city, its main port and its economic engine.
Today Lagos is one of the fastest-growing megacities in the world, with a metropolitan population that estimates put at anywhere from fifteen million to more than twenty million people. It is a city of extreme contrasts: skyscrapers and banks on Victoria Island and in Ikoyi stand alongside huge working-class neighbourhoods and Makoko, the famous 'floating city' of stilt houses on the lagoon. Traffic, flooding and inequality are everyday challenges, but so are the inventiveness and resilience of the people who live here.
Over the last two decades, Lagos has established itself as Africa's cultural capital. This is where 'afrobeats' came from, the genre that conquered the global charts through artists such as Wizkid, Burna Boy, Davido and Tems, following on from the afrobeat that Fela Kuti created in the 1970s. This is also the home of Nollywood, Nigeria's film industry and one of the world's most prolific. And fashion, contemporary art, food and a thriving tech and start-up scene are all flourishing here too.
The Lagos State government has pushed through major projects: the restoration of historic neighbourhoods, urban rail lines (the Blue Line and the Red Line, around 2023-2024), the ambitious Eko Atlantic development built on land reclaimed from the sea off Victoria Island, and transport improvements. Chaotic and contradictory, brilliant and exhausting, Lagos embodies like no other city the energy, the problems and the enormous potential of urban Africa in the 21st century.
