Lüderitz

Stone-Age artifacts found in the region confirm that Khoisan People knew the area centuries before Europeans arrived. The Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias found ‘Little Bay’, or Angra Pequena in 1883. A German merchant from Bremen, Adolf Lüderitz, landed at Angra Pequena. In 1884 this land became part of the protectorate of the German Empire, marking the beginning of German colonial rule in Namibia, referred to then as Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika. The town is renown for its old-world charm and distinctly German colonial architecture.

Kolmanskop

To the imaginative but uninformed, the “Sperrgebiet” (forbidden diamond territory) conjures up images of watchtowers, electric fences, barbed wire and ferocious guard dogs protecting the restricted area. This may tickle the fancy but could hardly be further from reality. In fact, for most parts there is nothing – nothing but the limitless desert and the occasional forlorn notice board with its stern WARNING! WAARSKUWING! WARNUNG! ELONDWELO! And then you find Kolmanskop, a deserted Ghost Town in the Sperrgebiet – once a cosmopolitan center where diamonds were lying around like “plums under a plum tree”, a town built to last…until the diamonds ran out. Today Kolmanskop stands as a haunting monument to the day’s boom and bust, where once opulent homes, shops, hospital and theater surrender slowly to the relentless heat and encroaching desert sand.