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Namib-Naukluft National Park

The Namib-Naukluft Park is a national park in western Namibia situated between the coast of the Atlantic Ocean and the edge of the Great Escarpment. It encompasses part of the Namib Desert (considered the world's oldest desert), the Naukluft mountain range, and the lagoon at Sandwich Harbour.

The best known area of the park and one of the main visitor attractions in Namibia is Sossusvlei, a clay pan surrounded by sand dunes, and Sesriem, a small canyon of the Tsauchab. The desert research station of Gobabeb is situated within the park.

Location and description

With an overall area of 49,768 km (19,216 sq mi), the Namib-Naukluft National Park was at the time of its last expansion the largest game park in Africa and the fourth largest in the world. It consists of a strip of land on the Atlantic Ocean, including 1,609 kilometres (1,000 mi) of sea, that extends roughly 600 kilometres (370 mi) north-to-south from the Swakop River to the B4 road to Lüderitz.

Namib means Open Space, and the Namib Desert gave its name to form Namibia – "land of open spaces".

Wildlife

A surprising collection of creatures survives in the hyper-arid region, including:

• Snakes are elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes. Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales.

• Geckos are small lizards belonging to the infraorder Gekkota, found in warm climates throughout the world. They range from 1.6 to 60 cm.

• Hyenas, or hyaenas, are feliform carnivoran mammals of the family Hyaenidae. With only four extant species, it is the fifth-smallest biological family in the Carnivora and one of the smallest in the class Mammalia.

• Gemsbok, gemsbok, gemsbuck or South African oryx is a large antelope in the genus Oryx. It is native to the arid regions of Southern Africa, such as the Kalahari Desert. Some authorities formerly included the East African oryx as a subspecies.

• Leopards are one of the five extant species in the genus Panthera, a member of the cat family, Felidae. It occurs in a wide range in sub-Saharan Africa, in some parts of Western and Central Asia, Southern Russia, and on the Indian subcontinent to Southeast and East Asia.

Geography

The region is characterised by high, isolated inselbergs and kopjes (the Afrikaans term for rocky outcrops), made up of dramatic blood red granites, rich in feldspars and sandstone. The easternmost part of the park covers the Naukluft Mountains.

More moisture comes in as a fog off the Atlantic Ocean than falls as rain, with the average 106 millimeters of rainfall per year concentrated in the months of February and April.

History

The park was established in 1907 when the German Colonial Administration proclaimed three game reserves in German South West Africa:

1. Namib-Naukluft park was proclaimed as "Game Reserve No. 3", the other two were:

2. Omuramba is the term for ancient river-beds found in the Kalahari Desert of Africa, notably in the North Eastern part of Namibia and North Western part of Botswana.

3. Etosha National Park is a national park in northwestern Namibia. It was proclaimed a game reserve in March 1907 in Ordinance 88 by the Governor of German South West Africa, Dr. Friedrich von Lindequist.

External links

• Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia (1)

• Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia (1)

• Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia (1)