Walvis Bay is Namibia's great port and, for travellers, the capital of marine life on the coast. Its bay —the only truly sheltered one on the Namibian coastline— holds a lagoon that is a wetland of international importance, tinted pink by thousands of flamingos, and waters where dolphins, seals, pelicans and even whales in season swim.
The star activity is the catamaran trip to Pelican Point, a sandbank with a lighthouse and a colony of thousands of Cape fur seals, where dolphins often escort the boat and seals and pelicans come over to say hello, all washed down with fresh oysters from the bay and sparkling wine. For the more active, kayaking among the seals is an intimate, unforgettable experience.
To the south lies Sandwich Harbour, one of the most spectacular landscapes in Africa, where the giant dunes of the Namib drop straight into the Atlantic. You can only get there by 4x4 with an expert guide, working around the tides. Cool, foggy and full of wildlife, Walvis Bay is the perfect complement to Swakopmund and a must on the Namibian coast.
Walvis Bay was sighted by Portuguese navigators in the 15th century, annexed by Britain in 1878 as an enclave for its natural harbour, remained South African territory even after Namibia's independence in 1990, and was only handed back to Namibia in 1994. Its history is covered in detail on the destination's history page.
Read the full history ↓The oldest desert in the world and an Atlantic coast with a German feel, where red dunes meet colonial seaside towns and disputed ports.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
On a coast as inhospitable as the Namib's (foggy, without fresh water, battered by the cold Atlantic swell), the bay at Walvis Bay was a treasure. It was the only truly sheltered natural harbour on the whole coastline. Portuguese navigators sighted it as early as the late 15th century, in the age of the great voyages of Diogo Cão and Bartolomeu Dias, who sailed along this coast on their way to the Cape of Good Hope.
The name says it all: Walvis Bay means 'bay of whales', after the many whales and dolphins that drew whalers here. For centuries the bay was a port of call for ships that hunted whales, fished and collected guano from the nearby islets. Guano, the droppings of seabirds, was highly prized as a fertiliser. Its strategic and economic value, in the middle of an empty coast, made it a prize fought over by the colonial powers long before Namibia existed as a country.
The bay owes its existence and its wealth to the cold Benguela Current, which flows up Africa's Atlantic coast from Antarctica. That cold, nutrient-rich water feeds an explosion of marine life (fish, whales and dolphins, seabirds), which made Walvis Bay one of the most sought-after places in the southern hemisphere for fishing, whaling and guano collecting. The same current wraps the coast in fog and keeps it cool, and it still shapes the region's climate and landscape today.
In 1878, at the height of the European scramble for Africa, Britain moved first and formally annexed Walvis Bay and a small strip of land around it, attaching it initially to the Cape Colony. It was a shrewd move. By taking the only good harbour on the coast, London secured a key position and held back the ambitions of other powers in the region.
So when Germany declared its protectorate over the rest of South West Africa in 1884, it found that the best harbour already belonged to Britain. That is exactly why the Germans had to build their own port from scratch at Swakopmund, just 30 km to the north, on a far worse site. For decades, two neighbouring stretches of coast lived under different flags: British at Walvis Bay and German at Swakopmund. This unusual status as an enclave would shape the history of Walvis Bay for more than a century, and would keep it politically separate from the surrounding territory time and again.
South Africa occupied German South West Africa in 1915, and after the First World War it received the mandate over the territory. Walvis Bay, which South Africa already ran as part of the Cape Colony, stayed firmly in South African hands and grew into the region's main port, overtaking Swakopmund.
The wider background to those years was tragic. During German colonial rule, between 1904 and 1908, the Herero and Nama peoples suffered a genocide: a war of extermination, the seizure of their land, and concentration camps on the coast, such as the one on Shark Island in Lüderitz and those in Swakopmund, where a huge share of both peoples died. Although Walvis Bay was a British enclave, the whole coastal region carries that history. Under South African rule, the apartheid system was also extended to the territory, with racial segregation in ports, towns and workplaces, including Walvis Bay itself and its working population. The boom in the port and in industrial fishing drew workers from across the territory and beyond. They settled in segregated townships such as Kuisebmond, whose population still bears the mark of that growth shaped by racial inequality.
Namibia's independence on 21 March 1990 left a surprising anomaly: Walvis Bay and a few nearby islets did NOT pass to the new country. South Africa argued that the enclave belonged to it under the old British annexation of 1878 and kept it as its own territory, even though it was completely surrounded by independent Namibia. For four years, the country's main port was technically still South African soil.
The situation could not last: a country could not function without its deep-water port. After negotiations, and as apartheid was ending in South Africa itself, the handover was agreed. At midnight between 28 February and 1 March 1994, South Africa formally handed Walvis Bay over to Namibia, finally completing the country's territorial integrity. The whole country celebrated the historic moment: only then did Namibia control its entire coast and its most important port. The return was peaceful and negotiated, a symbol of the new era in the region after the fall of apartheid. When the Namibian flag flew over the port of Walvis Bay for the first time, it closed a chapter that had opened 116 years earlier, when the British established their enclave here.
Today Walvis Bay is the engine of Namibia's logistics. Its deep-water port, expanded in recent years, handles cargo for the country and for landlocked neighbouring nations, and it aims to become a major hub for trade in south-western Africa. But alongside the cranes and containers sits a natural treasure of the first order.
The Walvis Bay lagoon is a wetland of international importance (a Ramsar site) and a refuge for tens of thousands of waterbirds, with flamingos as the stars. Boat cruises to Pelican Point, kayaking among Cape fur seals and 4x4 trips to Sandwich Harbour, where the Namib dunes plunge into the sea, have made the town one of the coast's great nature destinations and the perfect complement to neighbouring Swakopmund. For the traveller, Walvis Bay sums up a unique story: the only good harbour on an impossible coast, fought over for more than a century, now fully Namibian and turned both to global trade and to protecting its extraordinary marine life. Few places capture the two faces of the Namibian coast so well: one of work and trade, and one of fragile, dazzling nature that draws more travellers from around the world every year.
