“One day Kolmanskop’s sand-clearing squad failed to turn up, the iceman stayed away, and the school bell stopped ringing.”

Once rich and opulent, Kolmanskop is henceforth a ghost town invaded by sand and lost in the middle of the Namibian desert. But its history remains as brief as it is surprising: Founded after the discovery of diamonds by German settlers in 1908, Kolmanskop went through a real “diamond rush” and quickly became the nerve center of the area due to its rich diamond deposit. The legend says that even by night, you only had to go down to find diamonds in the sand thanks to the moonlight. Kolmanskop faced a striking prosperity that attracted many adventurers and other prospectors from all over Africa; prosperity symbolized by the fact that the inhabitants of Kolmanskop used to get their clean water from Cape Town in South Africa, far from 1,000 kilometers away, or that they imported their champagne from Reims!

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Kolmanskop emerged from the soil very quickly, as the new immigrants settled in the city. Inspired by German architecture, we can soon find there a hospital, a butcher shop, a bakery, an ice factory, a bowling alley, a casino, a school, a power plant, and even a swimming pool! By the way, the hospital received the first x-ray machine on the entire African continent; but this machine was mostly used to verify if the miners hadn’t swallowed a diamond. At its zenith, Kolmanskop welcomed more than 1,200 people and 700 families.

But the drop in diamond prices after the first world war and the discovery of a bigger deposit south buried the last hope of Kolmanskop. Little by little, the inhabitants left the town, leaving behind their houses and belongings. In 1954, the city was definitively abandoned. Since then, it has been slowly but surely covered by sand. Nowadays, Kolmanskop is only visited by the few tourists that venture into this isolated area.

Lately, this unique landscape has been used by the movie “Mad Max” and the series “Fallout” to recreate those post-apocalyptic worlds where humanity is coming to an end. The Namibian ghost towns and the Skeleton Coast full of shipwrecks are a dream for any director, especially when there is an unreal atmosphere to recreate! Would you be able to find which of those buildings have been used?

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