These dunes, scorched by the sun and lashed by the winds,
finally come to die on a coast mercilessly beaten by the waves.
The same coast which, for centuries,
the sailors who plied the commercial routes between Europe and the West Indies
feared, respected, and above all avoided.
This coast has inspired many a writer.
Its sands are strewn with the skeletons of dead animals,
bleached by the sun,
testimony to the harshness of this coast,
where only the strongest and best adapted are capable of surviving.
They have seen many tragedies at sea,
and this place has well earned its fearful name:
The Skeleton Coast.
Not so long ago, the White Man also tried to adapt to this dry land.
They came here lured by the promise of untold riches, the diamond deposits.
But nature proved stronger, and they soon had to admit defeat.
Entire towns were abandoned overnight, as they fled from the terrors of the desert.
These ghost towns still provide the greatest evidence of the hostility of this land.
Shipwrecks, of many ages and many nationalities,
worn by the passing of time, still lie half-buried,
perhaps silently lamenting their absurd, unexpected fate.
The old ships, made of wood, have slowly crumbled away,
the combined effect of the sea, the wind and the sand,
but the most modern ships, made of metal, rise like ghosts from the deserted beaches.
The Skeleton Coast marks the limit of a desert which covers a narrow strip,
no wider than 200 kilometres, running from southern Angola to the Orange river,
the border with South Africa.
Like a coastal belt, the dunes and rocks of the Namib desert
cover 250,000 square kilometres along more than 2,000 kilometres
of the Atlantic coast of Namibia.
The Namib is one of the oldest, and most arid, deserts in the world.
Its mountains were witnesses to the cataclysms of the Jurassic age,
when the super-continent Gondwana split apart, creating new landmasses,
among them Southern Africa.
Just a few kilometres away, enormous dunes, over 300 metres high,
transform the landscape, making it unrecognisable.
That is the Namib, a constantly-changing desert, a dry land where life lies in hiding.
From the air, this mass of orange-coloured sand seems endless.
These are the tallest dunes in the world,
and below them lies the world’s largest diamond deposit.
It is a fantastic sight, which could only have been created by nature.
As the light changes, the dunes of the Namib
take on a thousand different hues, of spectacular beauty.
They are like mobile sculptures, shaped over thousands of years by the wind.
The underground rivers provide just enough water for the odd acacia,
adding a not-quite-adequate green to the symphony of crude colours dotted across the landscape.
But every year, there is a veritable explosion of life along the Skeleton Coast.
In October, the sea-lions come to these coasts to give birth.
The cold Benguela current, which travels up from the glacial Antarctic Ocean,
and along the south-west coast of Africa,
carries with it a considerable quantity of nutrients.
The sea is soon swimming with fish, and these attract the sea-lions,
which are the final link in this particular food chain.
At this time of year, Cape Cross is home to the largest colony of sea-lions
over one hundred thousand of them.
Outside the breeding season, males of the species are rarely seen
they start to arrive at the end of October, in order to mark out their territory.
They are well-fed when they arrive,
and can weigh up to considerable amount of energy,
defending their territories and protecting the females, and can lose up to 200 kilos.
The first European to set foot on this coast was the Portuguese, Diego Cao, in 1486.
A year later, another Portuguese navigator,
Bartolomé Días, with his three ships,
sailed into the bay, seeking protection from a storm.
After many attempts, he finally managed to land,
and named the bay ‘Angra Pequena’ (small cove)
But it was not until 1883 that the first stable settlement was established,
when the German navigator and merchant, Adolf Lüderitz,
reached an agreement with the head of one of the Nama tribes.
Lüderitz bought the bay for a relative small amount of money and sixty rifles,
in order to set up a whale processing plant here.
A few months later, Kanzler Bismark declared Namibia a protectorate of the German Empire.
In 1904, war broke out between the Nama and the Germans,
and Lüderitz became the first prisoner of war.
These are rich waters, and the whaling business rapidly flourished.
The port, and a modern processing plant were built.
But the real industrial and economic boom came later, with the discovery of the diamond mines.
This was in May 1908, when, during the construction of the railway line,
a worker called Zachary Lewala found a small, bright stone, lying on the ground.
He showed this stone to his boss, the German Augustus Stauch
who, realising what it was, requested permission from the authorities to prospect in the area.
The news spread like wildfire and soon merchants,
adventurers and fortune-seekers began to arrive in Lüderitz.
In just four years, the town was transformed from a small, remote fishing port,
into one of the most important cities in Southern Africa.
Still today, very little has changed around Lüderitz.
The most prosperous businesses are still where they were a hundred years ago,
and are still run by the descendants of those first colonists.