'The sea took everything away': how Nigeria's 'Happy City' is disappearing beneath the waves

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/18/the-sea-took-everything-away-how-nigerias-happy-city-is-disappearing-beneath-the-waves

Seascape: the state of our oceans
‘The sea took everything away’: how Nigeria’s ‘Happy City’ is disappearing beneath the waves

More than half of Ayetoro – a Christian utopia founded in the 1940s – has been lost to the ocean, and its remaining people are running out of options

Valentine Benjamin in Ayetoro, Nigeria
Thu 18 Jun 2026 04.00 EDT

In the early hours of 15 February 2019, the Atlantic Ocean came for Arowo Victoria’s livelihood. The 60-year-old retired midwife was asleep when neighbours began banging on her door, shouting that the sea had started covering buildings along the nearby coastline.

By the time she got to her small shop, she discovered that the Atlantic had already swept it away, destroying the business she had built with borrowed money after retirement.

“There was nothing I could save,” she says, staring at the shoreline where her shop once stood. “The sea took everything away.”

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Environmental experts say Ayetoro represents one of Nigeria’s starkest examples of climate vulnerability. Dr Nnimmo Bassey of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation describes the situation as a “profound injustice”.

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