Sandwich Harbour
Interesting facts
- In peak counts more than 300,000 birds have been recorded at Sandwich Harbour, including some 316,000 in January 2001.
- Shorebirds feed here at densities of around 7,000 birds per square kilometre, among the highest recorded anywhere in the world.
- The lagoon is fed by water seeping under the dunes from a desert aquifer; it proved brackish, not fresh as long assumed.
- The dunes that drop into the sea here rise to around 100 metres.
- It is one of the most changeable stretches of the Namib coast: in the late 1800s the Atlantic broke through the sand barrier and flooded the lagoon.
- The sand spit that shelters the southern lagoon once reached the northern wetland but now joins the mainland about 3 km further south.
- Besides the whaler Sandwich, the name has also been traced to a corruption of the German word for a local shark, Sandfisch.
- The lagoon behind the beach is about 3.7 km long and only 1 km wide, wedged between the dunes and the sea.
Why it is worth it
Sandwich Harbour is the place where the Namib Desert runs straight into the Atlantic. Along this stretch of coast south of Walvis Bay, tall dunes rise directly from the surf, their crests sharp against the sky and their seaward flanks dropping to a narrow strip of wet sand that disappears altogether at high tide. Few landscapes show the meeting of desert and ocean so bluntly: on one side, sand to the horizon, on the other, the cold grey-green swell of the Atlantic.
Behind the beach lies a shallow bay and, at its southern end, a brackish lagoon fringed with reed beds, an improbable strip of green in the middle of the desert, which draws great numbers of birds: flamingos, pelicans and flocks of migrant waders that feed on the mudflats. Its value as a wetland was recognised in 1995, when it became a Ramsar Site, and it lies inside the Namib-Naukluft National Park.
People have tried to make a living here and lost. The harbour was surveyed by the Royal Navy in the 1880s and served as a whaling and seasonal fishing station; its name probably comes from the English whaler Sandwich, which worked these waters in the 1780s. In the 1930s an attempt was made to harvest guano with sand pumps, but jackals reached the birds across the shallows at low tide and the venture failed; only the manager's house remains, slowly being reclaimed by sand.
Getting there
Sandwich Harbour is about 45 km south of Walvis Bay in a straight line, and considerably further by the beach route. Walvis Bay International Airport (WVB) is about 46 km away. There is no road: the lagoon is reached by four-wheel drive along the beach and over the dunes, only around low tide. Most visitors come on a guided 4x4 excursion from Walvis Bay or Swakopmund, which takes around half a day.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Sandwich Harbour, also known as Sandwich Bay, Sandvishawe, Sandvisbaai and Sandfisch Bai, is an area on the Atlantic coast of Namibia that includes a bay in the north and a lagoon at the southern end. Sandwich Harbour might have been named after an English whaling ship, the Sandwich, which worked during the 1780s, or the name may be a corruption of the German word "sandfische", a species of shark found in the area. Formerly, the bay was a moderately-sized commercial port based around whaling and small-scale fishing, but it is now best known for its birdlife in the lagoon to the south of the bay.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
-23.36667, 14.48333per Wikidata