KOLMANSKOP

In 1908, in what was then German South-West Africa, a worker, Zacharias Lewala, found a diamond while working in this area and showed it to his supervisor, the German railway inspector August Stauch. Realizing the area was rich in diamonds, German miners began moving to the settlement, and soon after the German Empire declared a large area as a "Sperrgebiet", and started exploiting the diamond fields.

Driven by the enormous wealth of the first diamond miners, the residents built the village in the architectural style of a German town, with amenities and institutions including a hospital, ballroom, power station, school, skittle-alley, theatre and sport-hall, casino, ice factory and the first x-ray-station in the southern hemisphere, as well as the first tram in Africa. It had a railway link to Lüderitz.