Wolwedans

Wolwedans is a family of tented camps and lodges within the private NamibRand Nature Reserve, in southern Namibia. Albi Brückner spent the 1980s buying up eight failing cattle and sheep farms in southern Namibia and pulling down the fences between them, turning exhausted, overgrazed land into what's now one of Africa's largest private nature reserves, NamibRand. His son Stephan built the first camp there in 1994 which consisted of four tents on wooden decks pitched above the dunes.

Today the Wolwedans collection has grown since into four camps and lodges, from the original, intimate Dune Camp to the larger Desert Lodge, perched on a dune plateau. Springbok numbers have climbed from under 1,000 to more than 11,000 as the land has recovered, and NamibRand has since been recognised as an International Dark Sky Reserve and Africa's first Wilderness Quiet Park so stargazing is a must here. You can also go horse-riding or hot-air ballooning over the dunes. The Wolwedans Foundation, set up in 2007, runs a desert academy and a culinary training institute for young Namibians, funded directly by tourism.