Four days in Swakopmund: a German seaside town that woke up in the Namib

Three nights on the Skeleton Coast. Half-timbered houses and a colonial jetty, a day at the Walvis Bay lagoon, dunes a ten minute drive from the hotel, and a cold grey sea nobody swims in.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Swakopmund
Places
9 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Swakopmund makes no sense and that is the whole appeal. It is a Wilhelmine German resort town, with a half-timbered trading house, an Art Nouveau hotel and a Lutheran church, sitting on a cold grey Atlantic beach with the largest sand sea on earth starting three streets inland.

The Germans built it in the 1890s because they needed a port and the British already had the good one, thirty five kilometres south at Walvis Bay. This stretch of coast has no natural harbour at all, so they built a jetty out into the surf, laid a railway inland, and set about making the place look as much like home as they could manage.

What you get now is a Namibian holiday town where the streets have German names, the cafes sell Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, and a fifteen minute drive puts you in dunes a hundred metres high with nothing behind them for four hundred kilometres. Three nights covers the town, the lagoon and the desert without hurrying any of them.

Highlights

  • The jetty at sunset, 300 m out over a sea the colour of pewter
  • Woermannhaus, a half-timbered trading company headquarters with a tower over the desert
  • Flamingos in their thousands on the Walvis Bay lagoon, an hour before dark
  • A steam tractor that broke down in 1896 and is still standing where it stopped
  • Sandboarding or a quad bike on dunes that start at the edge of town

Where to stay

Swakopmund, three nights

The town was founded in 1892 at the mouth of a river that runs perhaps once a decade. Everything about its position is wrong: no harbour, no fresh water, fog for half the year, and a sandbar in front of the beach. It exists because German South West Africa needed a port that was not British, and it grew fast enough that by 1914 it had a railway station like a small palace and a casino to go with it.

The First World War stopped it dead. South Africa took the colony, moved the shipping back to Walvis Bay, and Swakopmund emptied out until the 1930s, when it reinvented itself as the place Namibians go on holiday. It still is: in December the population roughly doubles and every guesthouse is full.

Three nights is the right length. Two days for the town and the coast, one for the lagoon south of here, and the desert whenever you feel like it, because it is a ten minute drive from anywhere in town.

Day by day

Day 1 in Swakopmund

The old town, and the jetty at sunset

Arrive, park, and then walk. The colonial core is about six blocks and there is no better way to understand the place than to cover it slowly on foot in the late afternoon.

Start at the old trading company headquarters, a half-timbered building the colour of the dunes with a tower you can climb for the view over the roofs and out into the sand.

Then go out over the water. The jetty runs three hundred metres into the Atlantic, the sun goes down straight off the end of it, and there is a restaurant built into an old tug on the beach beside it.

  1. 16:00

    Woermannhaus

    Architecture

    Built in 1905 by the Woermann shipping company as its headquarters in the colony, with an arcaded courtyard and a 25 m tower that was used to watch for ships and for ox wagons coming in off the desert. A national monument since 1972, and now a gallery and library.

  2. 17:30

    Swakopmund Jetty

    Other

    The first wooden jetty went up in 1905 and the concrete replacement was still unfinished when the war stopped work on it in 1914. Restored in 2005, it now runs 300 m out over the surf and is where the whole town walks at sunset. Windy, always.

  3. 19:30

    The Tug Restaurant

    Eat

    A real tug boat winched onto the beach beside the jetty and turned into a seafood restaurant, with the swell breaking a few metres from the windows. Expensive by Namibian standards, worth it, and you must book.

With more time: The beachfront promenade runs south from the jetty past the aquarium and out towards the salt works, and the walk is the easiest way to see how abruptly the town stops and the desert starts.

Day 2 in Swakopmund

The museum, the lighthouse and a room full of quartz

A slow morning in three buildings within four hundred metres of each other, all of them a short walk from the beach.

The town museum is the good one: a private collection started in 1951, covering everything from Namib geology to a reconstructed colonial chemist's shop, and giving a far more complete account of the region than the architecture outside does.

Keep the afternoon free. This is where you book the desert: sandboarding on the dunes at the edge of town, quad bikes, a scenic flight up the Skeleton Coast, or the tour that hunts for sidewinder snakes, palmato geckos and chameleons in the dune belt, which is much better than it sounds and the best three hours available here.

  1. 09:30

    Swakopmund Museum

    Culture

    The largest private museum in Namibia, founded in 1951 in the old customs house by the lighthouse. Prehistory, Herero and Himba material culture, rocks, a full apothecary and a room on the German colonial period. Two hours, and cheap.

  2. 11:45

    Lighthouse

    Visit

    Red and white striped, twenty five metres high, and standing in a small park in the middle of town rather than on a headland, which tells you how little of a harbour this place has. You cannot go up, but it is the thing you will photograph most.

  3. 12:30

    Café Anton

    Eat

    The German cafe that everyone ends up in, for coffee and cake in the middle of the day. The Black Forest gateau has a reputation that reaches Windhoek, and breakfast here is enormous.

  4. 14:00

    Kristall Galerie

    Other

    Built around the largest known quartz crystal cluster in the world, found in a mine inland and weighing over fourteen tonnes. Around it, a good collection of Namibian minerals and two shops selling smaller versions. Forty five minutes.

With more time: Book the desert activity the day before, not on the morning. The operators are small, the good guides go first, and afternoon fog occasionally cancels the flights.

Day 3 in Swakopmund

South to the lagoon at Walvis Bay

Thirty five kilometres of tar along the edge of the dunes takes you to the deep water port the Germans wanted and never got.

Walvis Bay itself is a working harbour town rather than a pretty one, and the reason to come is the lagoon on its southern edge: a shallow bay protected by a sandspit, one of the most important coastal wetlands in Africa, where flamingos gather in tens of thousands along with pelicans and waders.

Come back up the coast late in the afternoon and finish with a drink on the beach in Swakopmund, which is what the whole town does.

  1. 10:00

    Walvis Bay Museum

    Visit

    A small municipal museum covering the archaeology of the Namib, the whaling and guano history that named the bay, the maritime story and the region's minerals. Half an hour to an hour, and the best orientation to a town most visitors drive straight through.

  2. 12:00

    Crazy Mama's

    Eat

    A relaxed bistro with a beer garden, pizzas and enough vegetarian options to be useful in a country that mostly grills meat. The easiest lunch in Walvis Bay and good with children.

  3. 14:30

    The National Marine Aquarium of Namibia

    Visit

    On the Swakopmund seafront on the way back, and small but well done: a walk-through tunnel tank of rays, turtles and the ragged-tooth sharks of this coast. The diver feed at 15:00 is the thing to time it for.

  4. 18:00

    Tiger Reef

    Eat

    A beach bar south of the aquarium, reached by walking along the sand, and the standard place for a sundowner. Cold, windy and worth it: this coast does a very good sunset.

With more time: The full day version of this is a four wheel drive trip south from Walvis Bay to Sandwich Harbour, where the dunes fall straight into the sea. It is tide dependent, must be booked with an operator, and is the single most spectacular thing on this stretch of coast.

Day 4 in Swakopmund

A church, a broken steam tractor, and the road inland

Two last stops, both on the eastern edge of town, both on the way to the road out.

The first is the Lutheran church of 1912, which could be lifted out of a small town in Saxony without anybody noticing. The second is a rusting steam tractor sitting in the sand at the end of the last street, which is the best object in Swakopmund and the funniest.

Then the B2 east, four hours of gravel plain and tarmac to Windhoek, with the fog usually lifting somewhere around the first fifty kilometres.

  1. 09:00

    Lutheran Church

    Visit

    Built by the German congregation in 1912 with a stepped gable and a spire, and still holding services in German. Small, and best from the outside for the sheer improbability of it against a desert sky.

  2. 10:15

    Martin Luther Steam Engine

    Visit

    A road locomotive shipped out in 1896 to haul freight up from the coast and replace ox wagons. It could not make the journey from Walvis Bay before breaking down, was abandoned, and was nicknamed after Luther's line about standing and being able to do no other. It sits under a shelter at the edge of the desert, unmoved for well over a century.

  3. 11:30

    Coffee before the road

    Eat

    Fill the tank before leaving. The B2 to Windhoek has a filling station at Usakos and not a great deal between, and the crosswind on the open plain is stronger than it looks.

With more time: Heading north instead, the C34 up the Skeleton Coast passes the Cape Cross seal colony after about two hours, where tens of thousands of fur seals haul out and the smell reaches the car park.

Before you go

Getting here

Almost everybody drives. The B2 from Windhoek is 362 km of good tar and takes four to five hours, and it is the road most Namibia itineraries use. From Sossusvlei to the south the route runs through the Namib-Naukluft park on gravel and takes most of a day.

The nearest airport with scheduled flights is at Walvis Bay, 35 km south, with connections from Johannesburg and Cape Town. Hotels and guesthouses will usually arrange a shuttle, and there are two small shuttle companies running the same route.

Swakopmund's own airstrip is used by the skydiving club and charter flights, which is a more common way of arriving here than it sounds.

Getting around and where to stay

There is no public transport and there does not need to be. The whole old town is walkable in twenty minutes end to end, and the first two days here never leave it. Taxis exist but are hard to find in the evening.

Stay in the centre, west of the railway line, within a few streets of the beach. The old town is compact enough that the difference between hotels is character rather than location, and several of the best occupy colonial buildings.

You want a car for the Walvis Bay day and for the road in and out. Any two wheel drive will do unless you plan to take gravel routes into the park.

The weather nobody expects

This coast is cold. The Benguela current runs north out of the Southern Ocean, the sea sits around 15 degrees all year, and the fog it generates rolls in overnight and often does not clear until midday. Bring a jacket even in January.

That same fog is what keeps the desert alive, and it is why the dune life on the tours here is so peculiar. It also means you can burn badly on a grey day without noticing, which catches out almost everybody.

Swimming is a bad idea outside the sheltered water by the breakwater. The current runs hard north, the surf is heavy and the temperature is genuinely dangerous over any distance.

Money, language and the harder history

The Namibian dollar is pegged one to one with the South African rand and both circulate. Cards are widely accepted. English is the official language, German and Afrikaans are everywhere in this town, and Oshiwambo and Otjiherero are what most Namibians speak at home.

The German period here ended with the war of 1904 to 1908, in which the colonial army carried out what is now recognised as the first genocide of the twentieth century against the Herero and Nama. Swakopmund held one of the camps, and there are mass graves on the edge of town. The pretty streets are the same streets, and it is worth knowing that while you walk them.

Swakopmund is the only town in Africa where you can eat apple cake in a courtyard under half-timbering, walk two hundred metres and be looking at a dune.

Take it slowly. The walking is easy, the desert is close enough to visit on a whim, and the peculiar mixture of German provincial town, Atlantic fog and open sand is a thing you will not find anywhere else.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

When is the best time to visit Swakopmund?
The town is comfortable all year and mild rather than hot. December and January are the Namibian holidays, when it is busiest and most expensive. The fog is heaviest from about May to September, and the clearest weather is often in the shoulder months of March, April, October and November.
Can I swim?
Only in the sheltered water by the breakwater, and even there the sea is around 15 degrees. The current runs hard north and the surf is heavy. This is a coast for walking on, not swimming off.
Is Swakopmund worth three nights, or is it a stopover?
Most Namibia itineraries give it two, which is enough for the town and the dunes. Three lets you add the Walvis Bay lagoon or a Sandwich Harbour trip properly, and after several days of gravel roads a town with restaurants and hot water is more welcome than it sounds.
Do I need to book activities ahead?
A day ahead is usually enough outside December. Sandwich Harbour trips and scenic flights are the exceptions and are worth arranging before you arrive, because both depend on tides or weather and you may want a second chance at them.
How does it fit into a Namibia trip?
It is the standard middle stop: Windhoek, then the dunes at Sossusvlei, then north to the coast here, then either inland to Damaraland and Etosha or back to Windhoek. The road from Sossusvlei is gravel and slow, so allow a full day for it.