Twyfelfontein
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Some engravings were once read as a sea lion and penguins, hinting at journeys to a coast over 100 km away, though later surveys doubt this.
- The Lion Man has human toes and an impossibly long tail with a right-angled kink, ending in a six-toed paw print.
- Alongside the engravings, rock paintings survive at 13 spots, with human figures in red ochre in six shelters, a rare combination.
- Some boulders served as gong stones that ring when struck, and others bear grinding hollows and boards for ancient games.
- Food remains excavated here are mostly small antelope, rock hyrax and lizards, not the big game shown, which supports a ritual meaning for the art.
- The surveyor Reinhard Maack, who also found the White Lady painting on the Brandberg, reported the engravings in 1921.
- The site was declared a national monument in 1952 but stayed unguarded until 1986, and many engravings were damaged or carried off.
- Radiocarbon dates from the valley range from about 5,850 to 180 years ago, spanning almost the whole history of its occupation.
- The engravings lie on the banks of the Aba-Huab River, in an area receiving less than 150 mm of rain a year.
Why it is worth it
Twyfelfontein is a narrow valley of red sandstone in Namibia's Kunene Region, in the country once known as Damaraland, and its rocks carry one of the largest concentrations of engraved rock art in Africa. Scattered across boulders and slabs on the slopes are thousands of individual images — an early survey in 1950 counted at least 2,500, and later estimates run above 5,000 — grouped into more than a dozen separate sites within the valley. In 2007 it became Namibia's first World Heritage Site.
The engravings were pecked and ground through the dark desert varnish that coats the sandstone, so that each figure shows paler than the rock around it. Most were made by Stone Age hunter-gatherers over a very long span; people have lived around this spring for some six thousand years, and Khoekhoe herders arrived much later, around two thousand years ago. The subjects are mostly animals — giraffe, rhinoceros, elephant, ostrich, antelope — together with human and animal footprints, geometric patterns and a few strange composite creatures, the most famous of them the figure known as the Lion Man. Some of the creatures shown were never native to this area — a reminder that the images were about more than a record of what passed by.
The names carry the valley's story. The Damara and Nama call it ǀUi-ǁAis, the "jumping waterhole", for the small spring at its foot. The Afrikaans name, Twyfelfontein — "doubtful spring" — was given by a farmer, David Levin, who settled here in the late 1940s and found the water too uncertain to rely on. What you see today is a stark, beautiful place: rust-coloured boulders tumbled down the hillsides, pale tracks winding between them, and the images appearing one by one as your eye adjusts to the light. Nearby, on the same drive, are the rock columns known as the Organ Pipes, the blackened slope of Burnt Mountain and the Petrified Forest.
Getting there
Twyfelfontein lies in remote country with no towns close by. The nearest larger town in a straight line is Swakopmund, about 230 km away; the usual approach is from Khorixas, driving roughly 72 km west on the C39 and then following the gravel D2612, D3254 and D3214 south to the site, which has a visitor centre. The nearest international airport is Walvis Bay (WVB), about 265 km away, and most visitors arrive by car as part of a longer road trip through the north-west.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Twyfelfontein, officially known as ǀUi-ǁAis, is a site of ancient rock engravings in the Kunene Region of north-western Namibia. It consists of a spring in a valley flanked by the slopes of a sandstone table mountain that receives very little rainfall and has a wide range of diurnal temperatures.
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