In 1883 the Bremen merchant Adolf Lüderitz founded the first German city in South West Africa. A collection of corrugated iron huts quickly grew into a real city, with playful Wilhelminian style villas and wide streets lit with lanterns. At that time, the bay was the only sheltered harbor on Germany's south-west African coast. The imperial founders wanted to establish the capital of their new colony here, but then the administration was moved to Windhoek, in the heart of the colony, surrounded by farmland and at important railroad and road junctions. Lüderitz was sidelined. The diamond town of Kolmanskop fared even worse. The diamond fever that spawned this colonial settlement did not last long. The South Africans took over the area in 1915, the mine closed in 1938, and the last official left the place in 1956. Then came the shifting dunes. Only a few houses remain of what was once the richest city in Africa, some meters high filled with fine, golden-yellow sand. The desert would have taken the buildings back long ago if the Namdeb Diamond Corporation hadn't preserved them for tourists.
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