Collection
Higher Ground
The plateau towns — Jos, Obudu and Idanre — where altitude changed what could be grown, built and defended.
Nigeria is thought of as hot and flat, and a good deal of it is neither. Three places where height is the whole explanation: for the crops, for the cold, for where the town was originally put and why it eventually came down.
- A day inJos9.90°N 8.86°E
The cold months on the plateau
Jos gets genuinely cold, which almost nobody outside Plateau believes until they have spent a January there.
- GuideObudu6.67°N 9.17°E
The road up to the cattle ranch
A Scottish rancher started a cattle station on the Obudu plateau in 1951 because the weather reminded him of home.
- Photo essayIdanre7.12°N 5.10°E
The town that lived on the hills and then came down
Six hundred and sixty-seven steps up to a settlement that was occupied for centuries and left largely as it stood.
