Dem Bones

Namibia is full of ghosts.

Heavy fogs along the Atlantic coast in the northern part of the country have caused their fair share of shipwrecks;

the rusted, hulking bones of countless sailing vessels lying half buried in the sands of The Skeleton Coast.

{Namibia's Skeleton Coast, image via}

But these were not the ghosts that Spanish photographer Alvaro Sanchez-Montanes came looking for.

The ghosts he sought were further south, further in-land, in the long abandoned desert town of Kolmanskop.

Once rich in diamond mines, the German settlement flourished for four decades before being abandoned for good in the mid-1950's, the mines drained, the miners moving on, seeking their treasure elsewhere.

The desert has spent the years since shifting sands; blowing, drifting, and taking back what was once theirs.

It is these ghosts, those of the homes and the buildings and the lives once lived within their walls, they are the ghosts Sanchez-Montanes came to find.

{Indoor Desert images by Alvaro Sanchez-Montanes}

And he did so beautifully.

xo