Namibia Maritime Museum

What makes it special

Start with the ship models, built to scale and drawn from several periods. There are about 220 of them, the largest collection in Southern Africa, and they share the rooms with antique maps, oil paintings of the sea, navigational instruments and rare maritime postage stamps.

The power station was finished in 1911, in the boom that followed the 1908 diamond find at Kolmanskop. Its renovated industrial shell still frames the galleries, so look up at the building as well as into the cases.

The displays then turn to the working sea of today: fish processing, offshore oil and gas, sea salt, the port and the Navy. Other rooms hold giant seashells, the skeletons of sharks and rays, fossils and shipwreck remains.

Three small things are easy to walk past. Empty shark egg cases picked up on the beach sit among the fossils, and one display explains the safety rules brought in after the Titanic sank. Another records the speed marks set at the annual Lüderitz Speed Challenge, raced in a channel made for the event.

Visiting

Best taken from the ground floor upward, so that you finish at the top of the building. Up there, a captain's seat from a ship lets you imagine yourself on the bridge of a vessel from another age.

Stop at the library, a temperature-controlled room of first editions, old maps and hundreds of books on navigation and seafaring that you are free to browse. The building also has a coffee shop and a souvenir shop.

Then go out the back to the courtyard on the seashore side, where anchors, propellers, masts and winches stand in the open.

Tips

Do not mistake it for the Lüderitz Museum, a separate museum on Diaz Street with short afternoon hours that vary by listing, so check them before you walk over.

To see both in one day, spend the late morning and early afternoon at the Maritime Museum. Then walk along Diaz Street for the town museum's afternoon opening.