The story behind the whole diamond coast: in April 1908, a railway worker clearing sand off the tracks near Lüderitz found a diamond, setting off a rush that turned an empty patch of desert into one of the wealthiest towns in Africa within a few years — complete with a ballroom, a hospital, and southern Africa's first X-ray machine. Richer deposits found further south by the late 1920s drained the town, and by 1956 it was fully abandoned to the desert. Now a genuinely striking ghost town about 10km outside Lüderitz, half-swallowed by sand, and one of Namibia's most visited sites.
A German Lutheran church perched on Diamond Hill above the town, built during the diamond-boom years — one of Lüderitz's clearest reminders that this was, briefly, a wealthy colonial outpost in the middle of the Namib.