Ondo City is a city in Ondo State, South West Nigeria. Ondo city is the second largest city in Ondo state, and the trade centre for the surrounding region.
Yoruba and English are widely spoken among the populace. The Yoruba spoken here may have some dialectal differences from that spoken in other cities in the Southwest, such as Lagos or Ibadan. The primary economic activity in this place is agriculture. Yams, cassava, grain and tobacco are grown. Cotton is also grown, and is used to weave cloth called Aso Oke fabric. Ondo City is the largest producer of cocoa products in the region.
It is the host of universities and colleges of education. Some of the universities and polytechnics and college of education include:
There are buses at different bus parks that take travellers to Ondo city. The cost ranges from ₦1,000 (naira) to ₦30,000 depending on the city you are coming in from.
As in many other cities in Southwestern Nigeria, transport is usually by bus, tricycle (keke) or motorbike (okada). As a Traveller, it is usually best to ask questions from natives concerning the exact price range of transport fare. This will prevent you from being ripped off by the local transporters (particularly bike riders)
Obitun festival: This festival is a bridal dance in Ondo city. This dancing ceremony is traditionally meant to be performed by every maiden in Ondo before she gets married. The people believe that if the ceremony is not performed for any particular girl, such girl might end up being childless for the rest of her life. However, very few families still perform these ceremonies for their daughters before they get married.
For most locations in Ondo, you would most likely find coverage of the 2G/3G/4G mobile networks. Signal strength might diminish further away from the town center, and you might occasionally experience network outage for all or some of the mobile phone service providers in the remote areas of the town. Different networks tend to be more stable and reliable in different locations of the town at different times.
MTN, 9Mobile, Airtel (Zain) and GLO are all available service providers. So if you are planning a visit to Ondo, like you would do for many other places in Nigeria, you should probably consider having multiple SIM cards, preferably for all the mobile service providers, since you can't tell which will be more stable and reliable at a time in your location during your visit. And if you will risk not having any of them, you might be better off not risking the MTN network, because, from indications, it seem to perform well than the others, though its rates may be high and its offers and services might be stringent, but you are less likely to be concerned of erratic voice and data connection compared to others.
Airtel is another service provider which is fairly satisfactory for all you might need to connect to the world, including rates and network reliability. Of course, Glo (or Globacom) boasts of fast network speed for internet browsing activities, only that you might not be able to enjoy the privilege in some locations. And 9Mobile (formerly Etisalat) usually also performs well in internet browsing speed too but with locational limitations as well, plus data rate is fairly higher.
2nd-order administrative division
Primary administrative division