Kolmanskop Archive - Dark Tourism Blog

Dark Tourism & Beds

This is the theme that in the latest theme poll came second in the vote, and, as indicated in the winning theme’s post, I’ll now bring you the runner-up without a new poll.

Here’s a photo of one of the most gruesome places involving beds, namely a bed frame in a torture room of the infamous Tuol Sleng (aka S-21) prison in Phnom Penh in Cambodia. It was on beds like this that the decaying and ghastly mutilated bodies of the final victims of the Khmer Rouge were found by the liberators (the

14 February 2025 3 Comments

Dark Tourism & Graffiti

This is the theme that in the latest poll, as at the bottom of this post, narrowly came second, beaten by just one vote by DT & Bullet Holes, which became the previous Blog post. As I would have voted for Graffiti myself I then decided to compose and post this now without another poll. But I won’t let themed polls become forgotten again. There’ll be new ones before too long. Promise.

So now to this post’s theme of DT & Graffiti – but first I have to

18 July 2024 1 Comment

Dark Tourism & Doors

This time I’d like to revive a tradition that somehow got lost on this Blog over two years ago (well, they’ve been two quite troubled years, so maybe that explains it). What I mean is the “themed posts” we used to have on here quite regularly between mid-2020 and until early 2022. These themes added an often unexpected and occasionally even light-hearted angle to the topic of dark tourism. Today I’ll pick up that tradition again and give you a similar post – now one that is all about doors. And as before this will mostly be a photo essay.

How can doors be dark? Well, the first thing

19 May 2024 24 Comments

Pomona

As promised in the previous Blog post about the famous ghost town of Kolmanskop, I now bring you another photo essay about a far less well-known ghost town in the south of Namibia: Pomona.

This desolate place lies deep inside the “Sperrgebiet”, i.e. the ‘forbidden zone’, the restricted-access diamond-mining area stretching from Lüderitz all the way to the Orange River at the border with South Africa. A special permit is required to gain access to this vast area, and plenty of strict rules apply. But there are

20 October 2022 8 Comments

Kolmanskop

This is the most fabled of Namibia’s ghost towns, in fact one of the most photographed ghost towns in the world. And indeed it is immensely photogenic. Hence this Blog post will essentially be a photo essay (as promised in the previous Blog post). But first here’s just the briefest of summaries of the history of Kolmanskop:

The town owes its existence to diamonds. In 1908, so during the German South-West-Africa colonial era, a railway worker who had previously had a job at Kimberley Mine, South Africa, discovered a diamond while clearing desert sand off a railway track. He showed the find to his German foreman, soon more more diamonds were found and before long a veritable diamond rush ensued. The whole

9 October 2022 2 Comments

Namibia

I’ve finally finished processing the many photos I took in August in Namibia. Most were taken in RAW format so required a lot of developing/processing (white balance, exposure, etc.) so that was quite a bit of work, but that’s now done. In this new post I’ll give a general overview and a few taster photos (15 in total) – naturally with an emphasis on dark-tourism-relevant aspects.

One of the very darkest chapters in Namibian history was what is widely regarded as the 20th century’s first genocide, namely against the Herero and Nama peoples at the hands of the German colonial military, the so-called “Schutztruppe” (‘protection force’). This took place (mostly) between 1904 and 1907. One particular place

14 September 2022 No Comments

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