What is the population of Benin City, Edo?

Benin City has a population of approximately 1,147,188 according to the latest available open data.

Where is Benin City, Edo located?

Benin City is located in Edo, Nigeria, at approximate coordinates 6.3331°, 5.6221°.

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Benin City

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Benin City

Total population

1,147,188

Founded

1899

Elevation80 m

Land area1204 km²

Coordinates6.33°, 5.62°

Demographic figures from National Bureau of Statistics (Nigeria). Overview below cites Wikipedia and may reference a different year.

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City facts

Founded

1899

Elevation

80 m

Area

1204 km²

Facts from Wikidata (CC0).

Overview

Benin City is the capital and largest city of Edo State, southern Nigeria. It is the fourth-largest city in Nigeria according to the 2006 census, after Lagos, Kano, and Ibadan. Benin City comprises three local government areas; Egor, Ikpoba-Okha and Oredo with some parts extending into the Ovia North-East and Uhunmwonde LGAs.

History & geography

History

The Portuguese visited Benin City around 1485. Benin grew rich during the 16th and 17th centuries due to trade within southern Nigeria, as well as through trade with Europeans, mostly in pepper and ivory. In the early 16th century, the Ọba sent an ambassador to Lisbon, and the King of Portugal sent Christian missionaries to Benin. Some residents of Benin could still speak a pidgin Portuguese in the late 19th century. Many Portuguese loan words can still be found today in the languages of the area. A Portuguese captain (Lourenco Pinto) described the city in 1691: "Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses". Whilst 16th and 17th century European accounts of Benin City compared its scale to European cities, in a 1701 or 1702 letter the Dutch East India Company merchant David van Nyendael described Benin City as a “mere village”. Although he praised the king’s palace with its turreted roofs decorated with brass snakes, and described the city’s intact houses as “large and handsome,” he noted that the town had clearly been more densely populated in the past and was now mostly “half-ruined houses.” In 1820 a British Naval officer, Lieutenant John King, visited Benin city and wrote, "The walls having been to a large extent destroyed and the city having been formerly depopulated by a civil war, the circumference of the inhabited area does not now exceed two or three miles." In 1897 Reginald Bacon, a member of the British Punitive Expedition,…

Geography

Benin City has a borderline tropical monsoon climate (Köppen Am) bordering upon a tropical savanna climate (Aw). The weather is hot and humid year-round, and generally very dull, especially between July and September.

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