Kolmanskop: Namibia’s Abandoned Mining Town

The door opens onto a room with no floor. Where the floorboards should be, orange sand rises to halfway up the wall. In the next room a bathtub sits half buried in its own small dune. Outside, a street of solid stone houses with gables and verandas stands in the middle of the Namib Desert, ten kilometers from the sea and a long way from anywhere else.

Within fifty years of the first one going up, every family had packed and left, and the power of the desert followed. This is Kolmanskop, and one may ask how a once bustling mining town came to such ruin.

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A Stone on the Railway Line

In April 1908 this was empty desert crossed by a single railway line, running inland from the port of Lüderitz in what was then German South West Africa. The wind piled sand on the tracks every day, and gangs of workers kept them clear with shovels. One of them was Zacharias Lewala. One day as he was shoveling, he picked up a small, glassy stone and handed it to his supervisor, a German railway inspector named August Stauch.

Stauch tested it by scratching the glass of his watch. Then he said very little, quietly bought up prospecting rights in the surrounding desert with a business partner, and within a few years was one of the richest men in the colony. Lewala walked away with nothing.

The Rush and the Forbidden Zone

The secret lasted a few weeks. By June prospectors were pouring into Lüderitz, and they found diamonds lying on the surface of the sand just waiting to be picked up.

The German government moved fast once it heard of this newfound bounty. In September 1908 it sealed off a strip of coastal desert about 360 km long and 100 km wide and named it the Sperrgebiet, the forbidden zone. Only licensed companies could work there, and no one else could enter. It stayed closed for most of the next century. By 1912 the zone was producing about a million carats of diamonds a year, a large share of the world's output, and Kolmanskop was the town at its heart.

A Little Germany in the Desert

The first buildings were wood and corrugated iron shipped out from Germany. As the money came in, they were replaced with solid stone houses that would not have looked out of place in a small German town. At its peak in the 1920s Kolmanskop had about 300 German adults, 40 children and 800 contract workers from the north of the country.

The diamond companies were the town's lifeblood. There was a hospital with two doctors and one of the finest X-ray machines in southern Africa, used, the guides will tell you, as much to find swallowed diamonds as broken bones. There was a great hall with a ballroom, a stage and a bowling alley, where companies brought out opera singers and theater troupes from Europe. Fresh water, the scarcest thing in town, came by ship all the way from Cape Town. It was often called one of the richest towns in Africa, and walking through it, you would believe it.

Why Everyone Left

The end came slowly, and it started with a war. In 1915, during the First World War, South African troops took the colony from Germany. In 1920 the mining magnate Ernest Oppenheimer bought out the German diamond companies and merged them into Consolidated Diamond Mines, which later became part of De Beers. The houses stayed German; but the money now went to Johannesburg and London.

Then, in 1928, far richer diamonds were found at the mouth of the Orange River, about 270 km to the south, and the fields around Kolmanskop were already running thin. Through the 1930s and 1940s the company moved its people, its machinery and eventually its headquarters to a new town called Oranjemund. Some of Kolmanskop's houses were taken apart and rebuilt there. The hospital kept the last families going until 1956, when they left too.

Kolmanskop Today

For decades the town sat sealed inside the forbidden zone, slowly filling with sand. In the 1980s the diamond company restored a handful of buildings, including the great hall and the mine manager's house, and opened a small museum. In 2008 much of the old Sperrgebiet became a national park, now called Tsau //Khaeb, and Kolmanskop became what it is today: a protected open-air museum, visited on guided tours from Lüderitz.

What makes it unlike any other ghost town is the contrast. In the restored hall you can stand on the stage and look down the bowling alley, and in the manager's house the furniture is back in place. A few steps away, in houses that were left alone, the dunes run through bedroom doors and across kitchen floors.

The coastal town of Lüderitz, only ten minutes away, is still full of the colorful German buildings of the diamond years, and on the road in from Aus you pass the wild horses of Garub, grazing on the edge of the desert.

Kolmanskop is a stop on several of our Namibia journeys, both privately guided and self-drive: The Namibian Traverse: Private Guided Safari, the 16-Day Namibia Grand Tour: Private Guided Safari, the Namibia Grand Tour: Self-Drive Safari, and the 19-Day Namibia Traverse Self-Drive Safari.

To travel to Namibia with EcoVoyager, explore our Namibia trips or get in touch to plan your own journey.