A Long Weekend in Nigeria: Offbeat

Heads up: some links here are affiliate links. Book or buy through them and we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only point you to things we would actually use.

Before you book: Nigeria’s main visitor circuit, Lagos, Abuja, and Cross River/Calabar, is workable for travelers who take it seriously, but large parts of the country are not. Governments including the US State Department and the UK Foreign Office currently warn against travel to the northeast (Borno, Yobe, Adamawa: an active Boko Haram/ISWAP insurgency), the northwest and north-central “Middle Belt” (Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Niger: kidnapping-for-ransom and banditry), the Niger Delta (militancy and kidnapping of oil workers), and parts of the southeast (separatist unrest). Check your own government’s current advisory before you book anything. Even in Lagos, stick to vetted transport, skip solo night walks, and don’t flash cash or phones. This long weekend stays inside Lagos State and never goes near any of those flagged regions.

A long weekend is enough to do Lagos properly and still get out of the city for a day, and the out-of-city day is what makes this version worth the extra 24 hours over a plain weekend. This route pairs two days of Lagos’s art-and-nightlife side with a full day at Badagry, the Atlantic slave-trade port an hour and a half west of the city, treated with the gravity it deserves rather than as a photo stop. Doing a shorter or longer trip instead? See the 2-day , 4-day , or one-week versions.

At a glance

Day Base Focus Rough daily spend (USD)
1 Lagos Lekki Conservation Centre, Nike Art Gallery $60-90
2 Lagos National Museum, Freedom Park, Afrobeats night $50-80
3 Badagry (day trip) Point of No Return, slave-heritage museums $40-70

Naira prices are volatile (it floated in June 2023 and has kept sliding past ₦1,400-1,500 to the dollar), so budget in USD and treat any naira number as approximate.

Day 1: Canopy walk and Nike’s five floors

Land at Murtala Muhammed International Airport (LOS) and settle into Victoria Island, Ikoyi, or Lekki. Morning goes to the Lekki Conservation Centre, a coastal-forest reserve built around Africa’s longest canopy walkway (about 1.8 kilometers of elevated treehouse trail, with monkeys and birds below); give it two to three hours. In the afternoon, cross to the Nike Art Gallery, a five-story space of roughly 8,000 works founded by textile artist Nike Davies-Okundaye, and generally cited as one of West Africa’s largest contemporary art collections, with entry commonly free (confirm on the day). Evening is for real jollof and suya at a proper restaurant, not the hotel buffet.

Day 2: The museum, a colonial-prison-turned-culture-park, and a Shrine set

Spend the morning at the National Museum, Lagos in Onikan, open since 1957 with roughly 47,000 artifacts: Nok terracotta (the “Jemaa Head” dates to somewhere between 900 BC and 200 BC), Benin bronzes, Igbo-Ukwu bronzework, and the car General Murtala Mohammed was assassinated in in 1976. Give it an hour or two.

In the afternoon, walk Freedom Park on Lagos Island, a culture-and-events venue built on the site of the former colonial Broad Street Prison, worth an hour for the history alone before whatever live food-and-music event happens to be on. In the evening, catch a set at the New Afrika Shrine in Ikeja, the Kuti-family venue that anchors Lagos’s Afrobeat scene and its modern Afrobeats/Nollywood-adjacent culture; if you’re here in October, it’s worth checking whether the annual Felabration festival lines up with your dates.

Day 3: Badagry, treated as history, not a photo op

Badagry sits roughly 69 kilometers (about an hour and a half) west of Lagos along the coast, and it’s one of the sobering stops in West Africa: the Point of No Return on Gberefu Island, reached by a short boat crossing, marks where captives were forced onto Atlantic slave ships, and the Badagry Heritage Museum and several smaller relic museums fill in the history around it. This is a half-to-full day depending on how many of the sites you take in; hire a car and driver for the round trip rather than trying to freelance public transport on a tight schedule, and go in expecting a heavy, quiet day rather than a checklist.

Is Badagry worth a full day of a 3-day trip?

Yes, if you want this trip to be more than Lagos’s art-and-nightlife highlight reel. Badagry is a genuine historical site, not a staged tourist attraction, and it’s the kind of stop that’s easy to skip on a rushed itinerary and hard to forget once you’ve done it. If three days feels tight for both Lagos and Badagry, the 4-day version gives you more breathing room.

What do I actually need before I land?

A visa for most nationalities (apply through the official Nigeria Immigration Service e-visa portal , not a copycat site) and a mandatory yellow fever vaccination certificate, arranged at least 10 days ahead. Malaria prophylaxis is worth discussing with a travel clinic, and tap water isn’t potable, stick to bottled or sachet water.

Book these before you go

Keep some naira on hand for Badagry (cards are far less reliable outside central Lagos), and change any leftover naira back before you leave the country; it has minimal value abroad.