The wind is relentless today. It sighs over the dunes, whipping up the sand so it stings the legs of the tourists in their shorts. It whistles through empty window frames, sun-bleached and scoured by 100 years of sun and wind and heat.
Some of the buildings are buried almost up to their roofs in sand. Others, built high on the dunes, stand clear of the shifting desert, but their pitted woodwork tells a story of a place where it is either hot or battered by blowing sand or, most of the time, both.
For the diamond prospectors who trekked the 13km along the railway line from the port at Luderitz, it may have had little of the frightening detail, yet all the fiery despair of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of hell, only with less green. In fact, no green. Just a dun, sometimes golden landscape under a cobalt sky from which the sun leered down like God’s vengeance.
No wonder they built a ballroom and “opera house” with perfect acoustics. And an ice factory. They painted the inside of their houses blue or green ... anything to pretend that Kolmanskop, for a while one of the world’s richest towns, was an acceptable and occasionally habitable substitute for the gentle, well-watered, orderly places they had left behind in Germany.
The ghost town’s story begins on April 14 1908 when a man named Zacharias Lewala, a labourer working on the railway from Luderitz to Aus, was out walking in the dunes near a lineside halt called Grassplatz and found a shiny stone in the sand.
Lewala, who had apparently worked on the mines in Kimberley, must have suspected that he had found a diamond, but we’ll never know for sure.
He took the stone to his supervisor, Albert Stauch, who knew right away what his trackwalker had found ... and immediately applied for a prospector’s licence. For the next few months Stauch and a friend combed the dunes for more stones, which were in happy abundance.
For such a small and sleepy place, Luderitz is not short of interest.
In the ensuing diamond rush, Stauch would end up prospecting in Pomona, way down south, where one of his servants found so many diamonds lying on the ground he filled his hands and stuffed more into his mouth.
By the end of 1908, both men were rich beyond all dreams of avarice. Not Lewala, of course, who fades from the story as quickly as he enters it.
As with all things where riches lie on the ground just waiting to be picked up, prospectors were soon racing for Luderitz and the diggings at Kolmanskop, followed — naturally — by a government undisposed to let such riches go untaxed.
In September 1908, the authorities drew the borders of a “forbidden area” in which Kolmanskop was a brightly coloured stone of its own. They took the whole coast and called it the “Sperrgebiet”. Prospectors were barred from heading into the dunes to scoop up the diamonds and mining in the town came under state control.
By then, however, the boom was under way. Kolmanskop blossomed. A police station was built. Then, priorities: a bakery and a hospital, a school and a post office and a bowling alley. A narrow-gauge electrified railway came next, powered by electricity generated by a power station in Luderitz, and running 120km into the Namib Desert.
Like boom towns the world over, the party kicked off with good champagne and cold beer. For a little while at least, the people of Kolmanskop turned their backs on the scouring wind and bleached sky, and lived their best lives.
Then came the war and the South Africans, and by 1915 the Germans were gone from Kolmanskop and even from Luderitz.
Ah, Luderitz. The first thing you notice about it is how quiet it is. “Nice architecture,” said my friends when I returned from a stroll through the quiet streets, “but where are all the people?”
It’s true — you can walk the streets of Luderitz and feel like a lost extra in The Walking Dead.
It was once described by travel writer TV Bulpin as “an atmospheric, faded little place whose early bustle is a past dream”. And yet scratch below the surface and there’s a rough diamond, just like the one Lewala found in the sands at Grasplatz.
Luderitz, Namibia’s second port, 430km south of Walvis Bay and 300km west of Keetmanshoop, started life as a guano town in 1883. The bird droppings were a private venture by a German trader named Adolf Luderitz, who enjoyed the considerable backing of the German government.
The German flag was raised over the settlement on August 7 1884, marking the start of the kaiser’s first colonial ambitions in Africa. By 1908, the settlement was linked to Keetmanshoop by a railway draped over the Namib’s dunes, where even today track workers still grapple with the problem of sand on the tracks.
The port’s diamond days are long gone. It survives on fishing and tourism, and trains of manganese ore regularly ease down the hill and into the port.
Now for the delights. For such a small and sleepy place, Luderitz is not short of interest.
First stop is Luderitz Safaris and Tours on Bismarck Street to get a map of the town and check out the local tours.
Then head to the Luderitz Museum on Diaz Street, which is stuffed full of animal, human and other natural artefacts and colonial relics. One of my companions, who in another life had blown up roadside bombs in Afghanistan, was startled at the sight of a 3-inch artillery shell on display which he reckoned was probably still “live”.
Then it’s up the hill to the lovely Felsenkirche with its beautiful stained-glass windows, some donated by Kaiser Wilhelm II. A short walk from the church is the wonderful Goerke House, one of the town’s most extravagant buildings and which dominates Luderitz from the looming rock on which it is built.
Both the house and the church, and indeed many of the buildings here, are reminders of desperately homesick colonists trying to stamp their mother country on this unforgiving landscape.
The house was built in 1910 for Hans Goerke, formerly an officer in the German Protection Force, turned diamond prospector. He seems to have done better with diamonds than with the army for his house is an opulent structure, a mix of German art nouveau vaulted ceilings and rounded arches with some African themes such as flamingoes in the stained glass windows.
Goerke had a motto inscribed in German on each side of the front door: “Saying hello brings happiness in.”
Whether that was true is not known. He lived here for just two years before departing for Europe, never to return. The house became the property of Consolidated Diamond Mines and then the government and then the miners once more. It has been lovingly restored and while it appears to be used as a guest house for mining officials, you can get inside and walk around and look down on the town like the lieutenant must have done.
The house may be the most recognisable attraction in town but it’s worth strolling the streets in the early morning and evening cool to admire the other buildings that look both so out of place and also like they belong here, bursts of colour in the sand. Always the sand.
A few hours’ drive north there’s the wreck of a German ship called the Eduard Bohlen. In September 1909, the vessel was carrying mining equipment from Walvis Bay to miners working at a place called Conception Bay, 300km north of Luderitz.
A heavy fog rolled in, as it does on this coast, the crew became confused, and the steamship went aground. The high tide did nothing to dislodge it and in the morning the crew walked ashore, never to return. For a while the Eduard Bohlen became a miners’ hotel, complete with a manager. Then the diamonds ran out and the ship was abandoned to the desert.
Today it lies nearly half a kilometre inland from the sea as the Namib Desert continues its westward march into the Atlantic Ocean. The wreck is not easy to reach unless you join a guided 4x4 tour from Luderitz ... or have a plane.
The wreck of the freighter Frotamerica (and make of that name what you will) is an easier prospect if shipwrecks are your thing. The “Frot” was being towed from Brazil to scrappers in Asia when it broke away from its tug and beached itself 35km north of Luderitz.
The scrappers have been cutting it up on the spot but enough is left to offer a quiet lesson on why so many ships have come to grief on this coast: fog, sandbanks, shallow water and a lot of carelessness. This is not a place that rewards inattention. Or turning your back on the desert.
Back at Kolmanskop, they tried to keep the desert at bay. The blowing sand was cleared from the railway every day and swept from the houses. They tried to put it in the back of their minds too. Concerts in the music hall, the rumble of balls on the wooden floor of the bowling alley and — Bulpin writes — the hospital doctor who believed fiercely in the healing power of cold champagne and good wine.
The good times could not last. By the time SA troops chased the German forces from Luderitz in 1915, the diamonds were already becoming scarce. In 1928, a vast new field of alluvial diamonds was discovered near the mouth of the Orange River, almost 300km to the south, and just like that Kolmanskop was done.
A few hardy citizens stayed on to battle the desert but by 1956 the town was abandoned, leaving behind a highly atmospheric and deeply spooky place. Close your eyes and there ... the tinkling of ice cubes, laughter and the pop of a champagne cork, and a snatch of music hall song carried off in the wind.
Travel notes
Getting there
Most people drive on the B4 national road from Keetmanshoop. Make a short detour to Garub railway siding, where wild horses, apparently descendants of German and SA military horses, come to drink at the wells by the trackside.
Where to stay
At the top end is the Luderitz Nest Hotel (from N$3,850 per night, www.nesthotel.com). There are a couple of BnB options offering better value such as Kratzplatz (from R1,020 per night for two people, email kratzmr@iway.na).
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