It is also home to a museum and lies at the end of a currently[update] decommissioned railway line to Keetmanshoop.

The centre of Lüderitz' economic activity is the port, until the incorporation of the exclave Walvis Bay in 1994 the only suitable harbour on Namibia's coast.

[citation needed] Construction of a new port at Shearwater Bay, 30 kilometres (19 miles) south of Lüderitz, has been proposed for the export of coal from Botswana with a 1,600-kilometre (990-mile) railway connecting the two.

[2] The German magazine Der Spiegel reports that a massive green hydrogen project is taking shape in a former seal processing plant 80 kilometers south of Lüderitz.

It will measure wind speed, solar radiation and barometric pressure for the operation of one of the five largest hydrogen plants in the world.

[7] The town was founded in 1883 when Heinrich Vogelsang purchased Angra Pequena and some of the surrounding land on behalf of Adolf Lüderitz, a Hanseat from Bremen in Germany, from the local Nama chief Josef Frederiks II in Bethanie.

When Adolf Lüderitz did not return from an expedition to the Orange River in 1886, Angra Pequena was named Lüderitzbucht in his honour.

Although situated in harsh environment between desert and Ocean, trade in the harbour town surged, and the adjacent diamond mining settlement of Kolmanskop was built.

This previously bustling diamond town is now abandoned and fights a constant struggle against being buried under the shifting sand dunes of the Namib desert.

Several species of cetacean, notably the diminutive Heaviside's dolphin, can be seen closer to shore; larger whales such as southern right,[17][18] humpback, minke, fin and pygmy right are found in pelagic zones further from the mainland.

Independent Patriots for Change (IPC), an opposition party formed in August 2020, gained 990 votes and two seats.

The paper, which was started as a source of free English-language reading material, is run by volunteers from the British gap year charity Project Trust.

[26] In October 2011, Turkish-born American adventurer Erden Eruç departed from Lüderitz Bay for the final ocean crossing of his Guinness world record-setting solo human-powered circumnavigation of the Earth.

[27] Eruç rowed to South America in an oceangoing rowboat, taking five months for the crossing to the town of Güiria, Venezuela.