Before dawn on 15 February 2019, neighbours were hammering on Arowo Victoria's door. The 60-year-old retired midwife ran to the coastline and found that the Atlantic Ocean had already erased the small shop she had opened with borrowed money after decades of delivering babies in Ayetoro, a historic settlement on Nigeria's south-western Ondo State coast. There was nothing left to retrieve — only debt. "I am paying for something that doesn't exist any more," she says.

"They come to collect their money every month." Her situation is not exceptional in Ayetoro. It is the rule. Founded in the 1940s by a Christian cooperative that ran the town on broadly communal principles, Ayetoro was once celebrated across Nigeria as the "Happy City.

" Today, residents say tidal surges have grown dramatically more severe over the past decade, and the Atlantic has already swallowed more than half the community — hundreds of homes, schools, and churches reduced to memory or debris. While Lagos regularly appears in international headlines as one of the world's most climate-exposed coastal megacities, smaller settlements like Ayetoro have been quietly disappearing from the map with far less attention and virtually no infrastructure funding to slow the process. Emmanuel Aralu, 35, walks a stilted wooden boardwalk that once marked the outer edge of town but now sits almost on the waterfront.