Kolmanskop, Namibia (Luderitz)

The port at which we arrived this morning is actually called Luderitz but we spent the morning at a town about 15 minutes away - a ghost town called Kolmanskop. 👻 In 1908, Kolmanskop was simply a small railway station. That is until a railway worker found a shiny stone and took it to his boss, an amateur mineralogist. It was indeed a diamond and it didn’t take long for the area to be booming as Germans moved there and recreated a German town in the middle of the desert.

In 1928, other diamond sites were discovered to the south and those in Kolmanskop were depleted. People moved south. The last inhabitant left Kolmanskop by 1960. In the ‘80s, it was redeveloped as a historic/tourism site and some houses were dug out of the sand and restored. We found it quite fascinating.Read more