Swakopmund

The coast here was empty of settlement for centuries: fog, surf and desert deterred landings, and the Swakop river reaches the sea only after rare floods. When Germany claimed South West Africa in the 1880s it found that the one good natural harbour, Walvis Bay, was already British, so in 1892 a landing party marked out a town at the mouth of the Swakop and called it Swakopmund. Goods and troops were landed through the surf into small boats; a stone breakwater, the Mole, was built to shelter them and silted up within a few years, and a wooden jetty followed in 1905, itself replaced by a steel one begun in 1914.

The town grew as the colony's front door, with a railway inland to Windhoek, customs houses, merchant villas and a garrison, and much of its German architecture dates from this decade of building. It was also a place of suffering: during the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904 to 1908 prisoners were held in a camp here and worked on the harbour and railway, and many died. South African forces took the town in 1915, and trade shifted to Walvis Bay, leaving Swakopmund to decline into a quiet seaside resort for inland farmers and officials.

Uranium mining at Rössing from the 1970s, and later at Husab, brought steady work and population back to the coast, while independence in 1990 opened the town to international tourism. Swakopmund became Namibia's adventure and holiday capital, adding dune sports, hotels and restaurants, and expanding rapidly on its eastern side, where Mondesa and newer informal settlements now hold most of the town's residents.

Swakopmund's German character is the first thing visitors notice: street names, Lutheran and Catholic churches, bakeries selling Brötchen and Kuchen, half-timbered gables, a carnival and a shooting club. German is a home language for part of the population and a working language in some businesses, and the town has German schools and a German-language press. The effect is of a small Wilhelmine seaside resort transplanted to the desert.

That is only one layer. Most residents are Oshiwambo, Damara, Nama or Herero speakers living in Mondesa, Tamariskia and the settlements beyond, where church choirs, kapana grills and shebeens shape social life, and community-run tours bring visitors across a line that apartheid-era planning drew through the town. The colonial past is present and contested: the genocide, the graves and the street names are subjects of continuing public debate, and some names have been changed since independence.

The town also has a strong outdoor and adventure culture — sandboarding, quad biking, skydiving, fishing, surfing and desert running — and a long-running tradition of Namibians from Windhoek and the interior coming down to the coast in December for their summer holidays, when the population swells and the beachfront fills. Namibians call this migration "going to the coast", and the town's year is organised around it.

About 75,000 people live in Swakopmund, making it Namibia's fourth largest town and, with Walvis Bay 35 km down the coast, the country's second urban centre. The population divides sharply by area: the old centre and the seafront suburbs are low-density and often half-empty outside holiday season, while Mondesa, Tamariskia and the informal settlements to the east are crowded and growing quickly as people move in from the north looking for work.

Tourism is the visible economy — hotels, tour operators, restaurants, craft markets and the activity industry — but mining pays many of the steady wages, with the uranium mines in the desert inland running shift buses to the town. Fishing and the port at Walvis Bay, retirement, property and the public service fill out the rest. Green hydrogen projects on this coast are much discussed as a future employer.

Days begin under fog that often lifts by late morning, and the seafront fills in the late afternoon with walkers, joggers and anglers. Water and housing are the persistent problems: the town depends on desalination and boreholes in a desert, and informal settlements have grown faster than services. The contrast between the tidy colonial centre and the crowded eastern townships is the town's central social fact.

Seafood from the cold Benguela current is the coast's great asset. Hake, kingklip, kabeljou and monkfish appear grilled and fried on almost every menu, with calamari, mussels and rock lobster in season, and oysters farmed in the lagoon at Walvis Bay are sold as a local speciality. Anglers work the beaches for kob and steenbras, and fish and chips is an everyday staple.

The German legacy runs deep in the kitchens. Bakeries turn out rye loaves, Brötchen, pretzels, Apfelstrudel and Black Forest cake; beer halls and restaurants serve Eisbein, schnitzel, Bratwurst and sauerkraut; and the local lagers, brewed to the old German purity law, are drunk with them. Coffee and cake in the afternoon is a genuine local habit rather than a tourist performance.

Namibian cooking sits alongside it. Game meat — oryx, kudu, springbok and zebra — is served as steaks, stews and carpaccio, and biltong and dried sausage are sold in butchers' shops. In Mondesa the everyday food is kapana, thin strips of beef grilled over coals and dipped in a chilli and salt mix, eaten with fat cakes (vetkoek) and pap. The Topnaar people of the Kuiseb valley south of town harvest the !nara melon, whose seeds are sold roasted and pressed for oil.