This is remarkable as Damaraland is a barren region of treeless mountains, sand dunes and gravel plains. Save the Rhino Trust claims that Damaraland is home to Africa’s largest population of free-ranging black rhino. Accurate figures are difficult to come by but as many as 600, and as few as 100, are thought to remain.Īs for lions and elephants, so, too, for rhinos. Poachers nearly wiped out the population during the 1990s, and it remains imperilled. These desert-adapted giants are slimmer than their savannah brethren, and their feet are wider – the animal kingdom’s version of soft-sand 4WD tyres. That the world’s largest land mammal can survive in one of the driest places on the planet is indeed a miracle. Even fewer can explain how that can possibly be. But the population has made a remarkable recovery, with 180 to 200 lions thought to survive.įew first-time visitors to Namibia know that elephants survive in the Namib Desert. Of the five males featured in the recent National Geographic film Vanishing Kings: Lions of the Namib, four have since been killed. The lions of the Namib nearly fell extinct during the 1980s. The lions somehow eke out an existence along the beaches, sand dunes and barren mountains of the Kunene region of the northern Namib Desert. And yet, against all odds, a small population of desert lions exist in the Namib Desert. There’s everything here from the threatened desert rain frog to one of Africa’s only populations of wild horses.Įven when there were more than a million lions in Africa, they never managed to survive in the Sahara Desert. Despite its horizons being filled with sand seemingly to eternity, the park has been recognized as one of 25 outstanding global ‘hotspots’ of unique biodiversity. However, its secrets are coming to light, including the discovery of ghostly former mining towns previously swallowed by the sands. These days, it’s still only for the adventurous. It was a secretive place of abandoned diamond mines, treacherous sand seas and all manner of rumours. Until 2009, the Sperrgebiet region, now a 16,000km2/6,177mi2 national park known as Tsau Khaeb, was off-limits. Not that long ago, it wasn’t just the swirling fog that concealed much of the desert from view. It now sits atop a sand dune at one of the highest points anywhere along this coast. Or the Otavi, a cargo ship that ran aground further south in 1945. Take the Eduard Bohlen, which sank off Walvis Bay in 1909 but now lies marooned only 1km/0.6mi away from the sea. Some shipwrecks once washed by waves are, less than a century later, almost a mile inland. So powerful are the sand dunes that their relentless march has reclaimed land from the sea. Those that remain serve as reminders of the elemental force that controls everything along this coast. The ocean and constantly moving sand dunes have conspired to make many of them disappear. No one knows how many ships foundered along Namibia’s arid shore. This is thanks to cold air from the offshore Benguela Current crashing up against the hot air from arid inland. The Namib Desert experiences around 180 days of fog every year. It’s a strange sensation, peering out to sea through the fog from high on a sand dune and feeling suddenly cold. As you drive from Namibia’s interior to the sand-dune coast, the blast of cold air and rolling mists can be deeply unsettling, even otherworldly.

Some parts average just 2mm/0.08in of rain a year. Parts of the Namib rival South America’s Atacama Desert as the driest place on Earth. While it may not be the world’s largest desert, it is almost certainly the oldest. The Namib has been dry for at least 55 million years, and possibly as many as 80 million. It was inhabited by the kinds of charismatic African mega-fauna that makes us all want to go on safari. Take the Sahara, for example, which just 12,000 years ago, was a mixture of green savannah grasslands and forests. It’s easy to imagine that the world has always been just as we found it.

Not only is the Namib Desert one of the world’s most beautiful deserts, it’s also a place of mystery which conceals its secrets well. Wildlife thrives in a land almost completely devoid of water. Sand consumes shipwreck skeletons more than a kilometre from the ocean.

Perfectly formed sand dunes press up against a deserted stretch of coast, and inland for as far as the eye can see.

Desert in namibia africa