The world's highest red dunes — Dead Vlei's bleached camel thorns against an apricot sky
Sossusvlei is the visual centrepiece of the Namib Desert — a vast salt-and-clay pan surrounded by enormous apricot-red sand dunes, the highest in the world, rising over 300 metres from the desert floor. The adjacent Dead Vlei (White Dead Marsh) is one of Earth's most photogenic landscapes: 900-year-old camel thorn trees, bleached white by centuries of sun, stand like black sculptures against chalky white clay and towering amber dunes. Part of the Namib-Naukluft National Park, the largest conservation area in Africa.
The Namib is the world's oldest desert, arid for at least 55 million years. The San (Bushmen) people navigated it for tens of thousands of years. The name 'Sossusvlei' means 'gathering place of water' in the Nama language — in rare flood years, the Tsauchab River actually reaches the pan and fills it with water, an extraordinary sight last seen in 2011. German colonial surveyors mapped it in the late 19th century; today it sits within the Namib-Naukluft Park established in 1907.