The coast's name was not always the Skeleton Coast. It originally referred to the whale and seal bones that littered the beaches during the whaling era -- the industrial detritus of a harvest that stripped entire populations from these waters. In time, the bones were joined by shipwrecks. More than a thousand vessels of various sizes have run aground here, driven onto rocks and sandbars by the combination of offshore fog, treacherous currents, and a coastline that shifts as the sand moves. The Eduard Bohlen, the Dunedin Star, the Otavi, the Benguela Eagle -- their rusting hulks sit at various distances from the waterline, some now hundreds of metres inland as the desert has advanced around them. The name 'Skeleton Coast' itself was coined by John Henry Marsh in 1944, when he published a book about the Dunedin Star disaster. The title stuck, and mapmakers adopted it.

In 1942, the British refrigerated cargo liner Dunedin Star ran aground on this coast. All 106 passengers and crew eventually survived, but the rescue cost a tugboat, a South African Air Force aircraft, and the lives of two rescuers. The operation was harrowing enough to become the subject of Marsh's book and later a documentary. But the coast's shipwreck history reaches much further back. Near the southern town of Oranjemund, the wreck of the Bom Jesus -- a Portuguese vessel that went down in the 1530s -- is one of the oldest discovered shipwrecks of the Iberian Atlantic tradition in sub-Saharan Africa. The Strandlopers, coastal foraging people who lived along these shores centuries before European contact, left shell middens of white mussels that archaeologists use to trace patterns of occupation stretching back far beyond the age of sail.

The Skeleton Coast National Park covers 16,845 square kilometres of coastline, desert, scrub, and marshland, from the Ugab River to the Kunene. The northern half is a designated wilderness area. What looks barren from a distance teems with adaptation on closer inspection. Succulent plants survive on moisture harvested directly from the fog -- droplets that condense on leaves and stems each morning. Windblown organic debris from the interior feeds invertebrates, which in turn feed lizards and snakes, building a food chain from almost nothing. At Cape Fria, large colonies of brown fur seals haul out on the rocks. Inland, where riverbeds and flatlands provide slightly more hospitable conditions, desert-adapted elephants, black rhinoceros, lions, giraffes, gemsbok, and springbok share the territory. The elephants and rhinos dig wells in the sand, and other species drink from the holes they leave behind.

The Skeleton Coast has become a recurring motif in popular culture, drawn by its combination of desolation, beauty, and menace. Brian Cox used the rusting shipwrecks as a metaphor for entropy in the BBC's Wonders of the Universe. The Grand Tour filmed an episode here. The American television series Fallout used the coast as a stand-in for its post-apocalyptic Wasteland -- a choice that required almost no set dressing. Clive Cussler set a novel here; punk bands and jazz drummers have named albums after it. The appeal is obvious from altitude. At the boundary where orange dunes meet grey Atlantic surf, with the geometric shapes of shipwreck hulls breaking the line, the Skeleton Coast looks like a landscape that has already ended and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.