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| Kolmanskop | Photo album |
Kolmanskop (Afrikaans
for Coleman's hill, German: Kolmannskuppe) is a ghost town in the Namib
desert in southern Namibia, a few kilometres inland from the port town of
Lüderitz. It was named after a transport driver named Johnny Coleman
who, during a sand storm, abandoned his ox wagon on a small incline opposite
the settlement. Once a small but very rich mining village, it is now a
popular tourist destination run by the joint firm NamDeb (Namibia-De Beers).
In 1908 the black worker Zacharias Lewala found a diamond while working in
this area and showed it to his supervisor, the German railroad inspector
August Stauch. After realizing that this area is rich of diamonds, lots of
German miners settled in this area and soon after the German government
declared a large area as a "Sperrgebiet", starting to exploit the diamond
field.
Driven by the enormous wealth of the first diamond miners, the residents
built the village in the architectural style of a German town, with
amenities and institutions including a hospital, ballroom, power station,
school, skittle-alley, theater and sport-hall, casino, ice factory and the
first x-ray-station in the southern hemisphere, as well as the first tram
in Africa. It had a railway link to Lüderitz.
The town declined after World War I when the diamond-field slowly exhausted
and was ultimately abandoned in 1954. The geological forces of the desert
mean that tourists now walk through houses knee-deep in sand. Kolmanskop is
popular with photographers for its settings of the desert sands' reclaiming
this once-thriving town. Due to its location within the restricted area (Sperrgebiet)
of the Namib desert, tourists need a permit to enter the town.
In popular culture
Kolmanskop was used as the location for the South African TV series The
Mantis Project (1985). Directed by Manie van Rensburg, produced by Paul
Kemp, written by John Cundill, and featuring actors like Marius Weyers and
Sandra Prinsloo.
The town was used as one of the locations in the 1993 film Dust Devil.
The 2000 film The King Is Alive was filmed in Kolmanskop, with the town used
as the film's main setting.
The town was featured in a 2010 episode of Life After People: The Series.
The episode focused on the effects of wind and sand upon the various
run-down buildings and displayed rooms that were filled with sand.
The town was used in the first episode of the BBC series Wonders of the
Universe to help explain entropy and its effect on time.
The television series Destination Truth in one of its episodes investigated
Kolmanskop, rumored to be haunted.
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