Abuja looks brand new, but the savanna beneath it is not. Three days run from Zuma Rock and the 1828 court at Suleja that first carried the name Abuja, to Ladi Kwali's pottery and the parade ground where soldiers handed back power in 1999.
A 725m gabbro monolith guarding the old Abuja–Kaduna road, Zuma was the Gbagyi people's natural fortress against 19th-century Fulani cavalry raids. Its human-like face is printed on the ₦100 note.
Opened in 1978 around terracotta and Nok-influenced pottery excavated locally, its galleries trace Gwari and Hausa craft alongside the 1828 founding of old Abuja town by exiles fleeing Zazzau. Open 09:00–17:00.
Old Abuja's ruling house, founded in 1828 when Mohammed Makau fled the Fulani jihad in Zaria and set up a Habe kingdom here. The town surrendered its name to the new capital in 1976 and became Suleja; the throne and war drums stayed.
Gbagyi women have coil-built and pit-fired pots at Ushafa for generations. The village drew world press when Bill Clinton visited in August 2000 and threw a pot himself. Firing is still done in open ground with wood.
Built in 1994 for the general who died in Abacha's custody in 1997, the centre holds the working archives of Nigeria's pro-democracy struggle, a memorial hall and rotating exhibitions on the military years. Weekdays 09:00–17:00.
The parade ground where Abdulsalami Abubakar handed power to Olusegun Obasanjo on 29 May 1999, ending fifteen straight years of army rule. The cenotaph beside it takes Armed Forces Remembrance wreaths every 15 January.
Founded in 1993 and housed in the Federal Secretariat, the gallery keeps the state collection of modern Nigerian art — Zaria Rebels canvases, Osogbo school prints and post-civil-war work acquired to build a national canon after 1970.
Opened in 2004 with the crests of all 36 states ringing the basin, it became Nigeria's protest ground — Occupy Nigeria filled it in January 2012, and the Bring Back Our Girls sit-ins ran here daily from April 2014.
Ladi Kwali, the Gwari potter who trained under Michael Cardew from 1954 and exhibited in London, came from this town. The centre still teaches her hand-coiled, incised ware. She remains the only woman on Nigerian currency, the ₦20 note.
Zuba was a Gwari trading settlement long before the Federal Capital Territory was decreed in 1976. The market still turns on the old cycle — yam, guinea corn, calabash and dawadawa locust-bean cakes sold by the heap, not the kilo.
Opened in 2004 off Ahmadu Bello Way, the village gathers about 100 stalls of Benin bronze casting, Kano leatherwork, Nupe brass and Akwete cloth — trades that predate the capital by centuries and were relocated into it.
Consecrated in 2005 after sixteen years of stop-start building, the ecumenical centre was sited as the deliberate counterweight to the National Mosque across the axis — a built statement of the constitutional balance between the two faiths.