San rock paintings

For thousands of years the overhangs of Spitzkoppe gave San hunter-gatherers shade, water and shelter. This walk follows their landscape at an easy pace, from the open plains into the boulders.

Your guide takes you to quiet painted shelters away from the main roads and to the Bushman’s Paradise amphitheatre, where red-ochre paintings of rhino, zebra, eland and dancers survive on the granite. There are shade stops under the boulders between sites.

At each site you hear the Damara and San oral history connected to the paintings, and how the pigments were made. The paintings are fragile and many have faded, so we look closely but never touch.