Nigeria's cool highland city — Nok terracotta from 2,500 years ago, a wildlife park above the plateau, and a climate unlike anywhere else in the country
Jos sits on the Jos Plateau at 1,285m, which gives it temperatures 10°C cooler than the rest of Nigeria — a year-round mildness that made it a favoured British colonial hill station and that continues to make it distinct. The city is also the access point for the Nok Culture archaeological sites: terracotta figurines of extraordinary sophistication produced by a civilization centred on the Jos Plateau between roughly 1500 BCE and 500 CE, predating any other complex art tradition in sub-Saharan Africa. The Jos Wildlife Park (inside the city) and Shere Hills game reserve on the plateau's edge o…
The Jos Plateau was inhabited by the Nok, Birom, Anaguta, and other plateau peoples long before colonialism. The British established Jos as a tin-mining administrative centre in 1915, driven by the plateau's substantial tin reserves — the city grew rapidly through the 1920s–1940s as the largest tin-mining operation in the British Empire. Nigerian independence in 1960 brought political reorganisation; Jos became the capital of Plateau State in 1976. The Nok Culture's terracotta were first identified scientifically in the 1940s during mining operations, when figurines were recovered from tin-be…