Atlas of Lost Cities: Forgotten Places Remembered

Discover Earth’s Forgotten Destinations: An Atlas of places that time and man has let disintegrate

Buchhalter Kolmannskuppe
Buchhalter Kolmannskuppe: One of the destinations of forsaken cities in the book

By Devinne Zadravec

atlas of lost cities
Atlas of Lost Cities. Click to order

How easy it is to forget the ephemeral nature of any creation—especially one as grand and essential as a human city. Like the humans that inhabit them, cities have a life: their heartbeat, the footsteps tapped out along the sidewalk, their bones the buildings and structures that lie within.

But what happens when a city dies? It is hard to imagine a city of any consequence suddenly ceasing to exist, but history has proven that this is the fate that awaits any metropolis. In the Atlas of Lost Cities, A Travel Guide to Abandoned and Forsaken Destinations, the author brings us to forgotten places around the world.

The tales of these forgotten cities are mysterious, intriguing stories, and Aude de Tocqueville has detailed them all with depressing clarity. Within the pages of this book are the illustrated stories of these abandoned and forsaken urban destinations, and the fates they met. For history buffs, mystery fanatics, and travel junkies alike, the Atlas of Lost Cities is a highly entertaining read filled with stories of the world’s forgotten destinations.

Aude de Tocqueville is the author of numerous books about historical or artistic themes, including Monumental Paris and The Most Beautiful Villages of France. She is an award-winning cultural heritage history author who has published more than 20 books in her native France.

Excerpt from the Atlas of Lost Cities

Kolmannskuppe: Entombed in Sand

kolmannskuppe inside 1
Kolmannskuppe: inside an abandoned house.

Be warned: Do not venture in this city if you are afraid of ghosts. Terrified travelers claim to have encountered the spirits of the dead flitting through its abandoned houses, which disappear a little deeper under the sand each day. Located a few kilometers from the port of Lüderitz, the only inhabited city within a 130-kilometer radius Kolmannskuppe is the place to see in the Namib desert. However, would-be visitors have to apply for the appropriate permit, which is issued on an individual basis.

Without this magic key, there is no hope of entering the 26,000-square-kilometer desert zone, which is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and extends from Lüderitz in southwestern Namibia to Oranjemund, at the border of South Africa, for it is out of bounds to the general public. The reason for this is purely economic: the ground contains diamond deposits, and the authorities therefore choose to keep the area under close control. Indeed the city of Kolmannskuppe (Kolmanskop in Afrikaans) would not have existed but for the diamonds that made it prosperous—and were responsible for its decline.

In 1908, when what is now Namibia was the German protectorate of South-West Africa, a black worker employed on the construction of the railroad between Keetmanshoop and Lüderitz casually picked up a stone that turned out to be a diamond. As soon as the news got out, people flocked to the place. Amid the frenzy, a new town popped out of the ground like a mushroom. Within the space of a few years it had become one of the most prosperous in Africa. Connected to Lüderitz by a tramway, Kolmannskuppe had its own casino, theater, schools, swimming pools, businesses, and a department store selling all the latest goods from Berlin.

The Continent’s First X-ray Machine

It even had a hospital that was one of the first on the continent to have an X-ray machine! The most select merchandise was imported from Germany and France, and water, which was more expensive in Namibia than beer, was shipped in at great cost. It should be remembered that money was no problem, and it is even said that the streets were swept every day in order to clear them of the sand that obstinately returned on the wind. However, all the commodities and comforts of this colonialist paradise, this “little Germany” were reserved for the engineers and managers of the German company to whom exclusive rights of extraction had been granted.

© Gerard Uferas Aude de Tocqueville 03_2011
Aude de Tocqueville

The black workers who did the toughest jobs were housed with their families on a separate site, or, if single, accommodated in dormitories. The First World War, which saw the administration of South-West Africa pass to South Africa under a League of Nations mandate, made no impact on the prosperity of Kolmannskuppe.

At its peak in the 1920s, the town boasted more than one thousand inhabitants, almost three hundred of them European. During the following decade, times were less good: adversely affected by the discovery of new deposits in the Oranjemund region and an ensuing fall in price, the former “pearl of the desert” declined as its diamond seams dried up.

Population Drifted Away

The end was close. Gradually the population drifted away, although it was not until 1956, the year the hospital closed for good, that the last remaining residents packed their bags and left.

Once deserted, the township sank into oblivion until 1990, when the Namibian government and the De Beers Company, partners in the exploitation of the prohibited zone, decided to turn it into a tourist site. The idea was a good one: the buildings emerging from the dunes, the wooden facades faded by the sun, and the interiors invaded by the sands transformed the place into one of southern Namibia’s major attractions.

Guides were trained to tell visitors about the history of the town and a small museum was established in the former casino, where precious stones could also be bought as souvenirs. This return of life to Kolmannskuppe in no way detracts from the strangeness of the place, however. A number of houses have been restored and refurbished in the simultaneously elegant and functional style of the Wilhelminian era, giving the impression they might have been abandoned yesterday.

Others have been preserved exactly as their occupants left them, with wallpaper and pictures still clinging to the walls, with baths and kitchens still in place, with counters still visible in the stores and machinery in the workshops—only with everything having been exposed to the ravages of time and sand. Everything here is as if locked into an eternal process of gradual decay, and it is difficult no to succumb to the ambiguous charms of this aesthetic of chaos.

Buy The Atlas of Lost Cities: A Travel Guide to Abandoned and Forsaken Destinations on Amazon

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