In 1908, the discovery of a single diamond in Kolmanskop, a tiny village huddled between the sand hummocks of Namibia, flooded the area with diamond mongers, transforming a sleepy town a couple miles from port into a buzzing (and super rich) hot spot for German miners and moguls. New residents built homes, a school, a hospital, a theater, a casino, and a ballroom, all in the style of the German towns of olde. Well, the success of the first miners soon became hard to replicate, as the diamond stream ran dry and World War I austerity programs made diamonds suddenly much harder to sell. Folks hired to keep the wind-blown sand away stopped showing up, and by 1954, the town was abandoned completely. The desert then recolonized the town, as wind wafted dunes into the architecture's interiors, still done up in the colors voguish around the turn of the century. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the town's scenes of the desert's aggressive repatriation are now a bit of a photographer magnet, and stunning images of the town are basically all over the internet. A few of the best are below.
· Devoured By The Desert: Creepy Kolmanskop Ghost Town [Love These Pics via io9]
· All Abandonment Issues posts [Curbed National]
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