In 1484 King John II of Portugal sent the navigator Diogo Cao south down an unknown coast, hunting a sea route to India and the spice lands of the East. Cao was ordered to claim notable points for Portugal by raising stone pillars called padroes. On his second voyage he reached this headland in January 1486, the first European known to set foot here, and planted a padrao topped with a cross. The cape took its name from that monument. The original stood for more than four centuries against the wind and salt, an outpost of one world pressed against the edge of another, until the politics of empire came to collect it.

In 1893 a German corvette captain named Gottlieb Becker, commanding a cruiser of the Imperial German Navy, removed Cao's padrao and shipped it to Berlin, where it was held in the Deutsches Historisches Museum until Namibia requested its return; the museum pledged repatriation in 2019 and the cross was sent back to Namibia that same year. A plain wooden cross took its place, replaced two years later by a stone replica. At the close of the twentieth century, private donors raised a second cross, modeled more faithfully on the lost original, so that two now stand together on the cape. The inscription records the year in two reckonings at once, counting from the creation of the world and from the birth of Christ, a small monument to how differently the people who passed this way measured time.

The colony is the reason most travelers come. Proclaimed a protected area in the early 1960s and now run by the Namibian government as the Cape Cross Seal Reserve, the site holds Cape fur seals in numbers that strain belief, swelling toward 210,000 animals at the November and December peak of the breeding season. The Benguela current is the secret: its cold, nutrient-rich upwelling pours fish into these waters, and the seals haul out on the rocks in a heaving, barking carpet that runs to the horizon. Bulls hold harems by sheer bulk. Mothers find their own pup among thousands by scent and call alone. Jackals and brown hyenas patrol the margins for the weak and the dead.

The colony also sits at the center of a difficult debate. Cape Cross is one of two places in Namibia, the other near Luderitz, where seals are culled, both for their hides and in the name of protecting fish stocks. The economics are fiercely contested. A government-backed study concluded that the seal colonies eat more fish than the entire commercial fleet can catch, while the group Seal Alert South Africa put the colonies' impact on commercial fisheries at less than 0.3 percent. The dispute has no tidy resolution, and standing in the roar and stench of so many thousands of living animals, the abstraction of the numbers gives way to the sheer, undeniable mass of life on the rocks.