Namib Desert at the Atlantic Ocean in Africa

© Robert Harding World Imagery/Offset

Namib Desert at the Atlantic Ocean in Africa

Stretching north to south for 1,243 miles, the Namib Desert starts in Angola, covers the entire west coast of Namibia, and reaches down into South Africa. It’s primarily a sand sea, but hosts some gravel terrain farther inland. The western edge of the Namib runs smack into the Atlantic Ocean. Though fogs often shroud the coast of the desert, the Namib as a whole gets less than a half an inch of rain annually.