Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Windhoek
Population: 3 million+
Language: English (also Oshiwambo, Khoekhoegowab & others)
1 – Fish River Canyon (above)
The Fish River Canyon, slicing across the desert of southern Namibia, is the largest canyon in Africa and often ranked among the largest on Earth, a chasm about 160 km long, up to 27 km wide and up to 550 m deep.
The oldest rocks of the Fish River Canyon are well over a billion years old, and from May to mid-September hikers tackle a trail of roughly 85 km along its floor, usually taking about five days and ending at the hot springs of Ai-Ais.
Local legend tells of a giant serpent, Koutein Kooru, that carved the twisting bends of the Fish River Canyon as it fled into the desert from hunters.
2 – Etosha National Park
Etosha National Park spreads across northern Namibia around the Etosha Pan, a salt flat of almost 5,000 km² visible from space, whose name means “Great White Place” and which was once a lake fed by the Kunene River until the river changed course.
For most of the year the pan is dry, so the wildlife of Etosha gathers at the waterholes around it, among them the floodlit waterhole at Okaukuejo, where elephants, lions, giraffes and black rhinos come to drink in one of the world’s great rhino strongholds.
The elephants of Etosha are among the tallest in Africa, the bulls reaching about 4 m at the shoulder, yet their tusks are short and break easily, a trait attributed to a lack of minerals in their diet.
3 – Sossusvlei Sand Dunes
Sossusvlei, deep in the Namib, considered the oldest desert on Earth, is a clay pan where the Tsauchab River ends, though it rarely flows this far, ringed by towering red dunes, such as Big Daddy, about 325 m high.
Visitors to Sossusvlei climb dunes such as Dune 45 and Big Daddy at dawn to watch the rising sun turn the ridges of sand from gold to deep red.
Hidden among the dunes near Sossusvlei lies Deadvlei, a white clay pan studded with the black skeletons of camel thorn trees that died some 600–700 years ago, the air too dry for them to decay.
4 – Skeleton Coast
The Skeleton Coast, about 500 km of fog-bound shore where the Namib meets the cold Atlantic, is said to have been called “the land God made in anger” by the San, and “the Gates of Hell” by Portuguese sailors.
Hundreds of shipwrecks lie along the Skeleton Coast, run aground in the dense fogs of the cold Benguela Current, while desert-adapted elephants, lions and hyenas roam the shore.
The Skeleton Coast is named for the whale and seal bones once littering its beaches and for its many wrecks, a name popularised by John Henry Marsh’s 1944 book about the Dunedin Star, which ran aground here on 29 November 1942 carrying wartime munitions, all 106 aboard eventually rescued.
5 – Cape Cross Seal Reserve
Cape Cross, on a wind-scoured headland of the Skeleton Coast, is home to one of the world’s largest breeding colonies of Cape fur seals, with up to 210,000 animals at the November–December breeding peak by the Namibian environment ministry’s count.
A boardwalk at Cape Cross runs almost among the seals as they loll on the rocks, surf in the waves and nurse their pups, while jackals and hyenas prowl the edges of the colony.
In 1486 the Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão raised a stone cross at Cape Cross, among the first European landmarks on Namibia’s coast, and the original, taken to Germany in 1893, was returned to Namibia in 2019.
6 – Twyfelfontein
Twyfelfontein, among the red sandstone hills of Namibia’s Kunene region, holds one of Africa’s largest collections of rock engravings and in 2007 became the country’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, its Afrikaans name, “Doubtful Spring”, given by a farmer who settled there in the late 1940s.
More than 2,500 engravings at Twyfelfontein, made mainly by San hunter-gatherers, show giraffes, rhinos, elephants, lions and ostriches alongside human and animal footprints, while Khoekhoe herders later added geometric designs.
The most famous engraving at Twyfelfontein is the “Lion Man”, a lion with an impossibly long tail ending in a six-toed paw print, thought to show a shaman transforming into an animal in a trance.
7 – Kolmanskop and Lüderitz
Lüderitz began in 1883, when an agent of the Bremen merchant Adolf Lüderitz bought the bay of Angra Pequena from the Nama leader Joseph Frederiks, the seed of German South West Africa, and in 1908 a railway worker, Zacharias Lewala, found a diamond inland, giving rise to the mining town of Kolmanskop.
At its height, Kolmanskop had a ballroom, a theatre, a casino, an ice factory and a hospital with the first X-ray station in the southern hemisphere, but richer diamond fields were found far to the south, and by 1956 the town was abandoned to the dunes.
On Shark Island at Lüderitz, German forces held Herero and Nama prisoners in a concentration camp in 1905–07, where a German officer reported 1,032 deaths among 1,795 prisoners by September 1906 and historians estimate up to 3,000 died, part of a genocide Germany acknowledged in 2021.
8 – Windhoek
Windhoek, Namibia’s capital, was founded around 1840 by the Nama leader Jonker Afrikaner and became Germany’s colonial headquarters in 1890, before South African forces took it in 1915 and held the territory until independence on 21 March 1990, overseen by a UN mission that was the Garda Síochána’s first overseas peacekeeping deployment.
The sandstone Christuskirche, opened in 1910, presides over the centre of Windhoek, with the old German fort of the Alte Feste below it and the Independence Memorial Museum, opened in 2014, alongside.
An equestrian statue raised in Windhoek in 1912 to German soldiers killed in the wars against the Herero and Nama was taken down in 2013, and on its original site stands a memorial to the genocide’s victims, a man and a woman embracing above the words “Their Blood Waters Our Freedom”.