Ibadan Travel Guide

Ibadan is the capital city of Oyo State, Nigeria and the largest city in black Africa. In spite of its size, its population of about 2.5 million is small when compared to Lagos, even though this is enough to populate some countries in the world.

The city is centrally located in the south-west part of the country on a rippling plain with ridges of about eight rocky hills. The average elevation of these hills is about 700 ft. To fully appreciate how uneven the city is, a visit to the Premier Hotel, which is situated on top of a hill is a must.

The town is roughly divided into what could be called ancient and modern Ibadan. The former seems to be totally cut off from the latter even though they practically exist side by side in some cases. One side of the road can be home to all the comforts of modern living while the other would be a dense area of cluttered mud houses that's inaccessible to all forms of modern transportation. What you have instead are foot-paths.

The modern part of the city is in stark contrast to this. Here you have modern roads, the sad state in which some of them are in notwithstanding. The buildings, both public and private, are mainly erected with concrete blocks with an architectural style that is difficult to place a finger on. You do not have to dig deep to find a reason for this; it is as a result of very lax local planning laws and a pilfering of architectural designs from all over the world. By the time the local touch is added, even the original designer would not have been able to recognize the finished product.

It has to be said that Ibadan is not the only culprit in this regard, Lagos as well as most other cities in the country follow the same pattern. To its credit Ibadan is home to Cocoa House which was once the tallest building in tropical Africa. The University of Ibadan, the first university in the country and where the distinguished Nobel prize winner Prof. Wole Soyinka went to, is also in Ibadan.

The city is fast becoming cosmopolitan with the advent of Lebanese and Asian businessmen in particular, though it is far behind cities like Lagos (the commercial capital), Abuja(the country's new capital) and Port Harcourt (the capital of Rivers State and where there is a lot of oil wealth).

For people who wish to experience how two cultures - western and traditional - can mingle, then Ibadan is certainly the place to go. What it lacks in excitement it more than makes up for in hospitality.