The divine beauty of Namibrand Nature Reserve

Good evening everybody

We will travel to Namibrand Nature Reserve (South West), which is one of my favourite places in Namibia, for its purity, silence and divine beauty.

A German-Namibian businessman from Windhoek, Mr J.A. Bruckner, started to purchase several sheep farms in the foothills of the Namib Desert in 1984. He had noticed that the land was completely out of its ecologic balance due to excessive pasture farming.

He had the vision to return the land to its original state and to create a Private Nature Reserve.

Mr Bruckner bought 16 surrounding farms, the last one in 2016, took down all fences and reintroduced game. There are mostly leopards, cheetahs, zebras, oryx, giraffes, springboks, in the reserve.

Today, Namibrand is the largest Private Nature Reserve in Africa, covering a total of 203,000 hectares.!!

In this protected and huge playground, there are mountains, savannahs, and gorgeous orange dunes, which make your heart melt.

There are also the fairy circles, which throughout Africa only appear in Namibia. They are round circles without any growth amidst the desert vegetation with a diameter up to 12 metres. Until today, there is no scientific explanation regarding the formation of these circles.

To make the Nature Reserve economical, viable and sustainable, Mr Bruckner allowed 5 tourism concessions.

Concessions are a means of providing access for tourists to parts of protected areas that are normally not accessible.

In this case, these concessions are lodges, namely Kwessie Dunes Lodges, Wolwedans Collection, an old farmhouse called Family Hideout ; activities such as Tok-Tokkie walking Trails, Namib Sky Adventures for Hot air ballooning and a non-profit environment education centre NaDEET, for Namibians to learn about sustainability.

A sustainability levy is charged for each day of your stay or for your activity, which is paid to the Concession to keep the Nature Reserve profitable.

The rules of the Reserve prescribe that there are only 25 guests’ beds in one location and that the lodges are at least 1000 hectares apart.

They are also bound by their concession agreements to respect and maintain the natural resources of this pristine area.

Here are some pictures of Namibrand.

Next time, we will visit together some of the lodges of the Namibrand Nature Reserve.

Otherwise, if you have family or friends who would like to join the group, let me know and I will happily include them.