Port Harcourt is the capital and largest city of Rivers State, Nigeria. It is the fifth-largest city in Nigeria after Lagos, Kano, Ibadan and Kaduna. It lies along the Bonny River and is located in the Niger Delta. As of 2016, the Port Harcourt urban area has an estimated population of 1,865,000 inhabitants, up from 1,382,592 as of 2006. The population of the metropolitan area of Port Harcourt is almost twice its urban area population with a 2021 United Nations estimate of 3,171,076. In 1950, the population of Port Harcourt was 59,752. Port Harcourt has grown by 150,844 since 2015, which represents a 4.99% annual change.

The area that became Port Harcourt in 1912 was before that part of Fishing settlements (fishing ports) also called Borikiri in the Okrika language and the farmlands of the Diobu village group of the Ikwerre ethnicity. The colonial administration of Nigeria created the port to export coal from the collieries of Enugu located 243 kilometres (151 mi) north of Port Harcourt, to which it was linked by a railway called the Eastern Line, also built by the British.