Namaqua National Park

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Experience wall-to-wall daisies in spring.

© Chris Marais

When you go to the Namaqua National Park in spring, you may feel as if you've tumbled into a child's dream.

In the Skilpad Wildflower Reserve section, it's a world full of orange daisies – great drifts of them. From horizon to horizon, you'll see nothing but spring flowers nodding at you and the sun.

Your ears will be filled with people's laughter and the buzzing of eager pollinators. If you're new to the spring flowers of the succulent Karoo, you could ask for no better place to experience their magic.

Some people try to capture it all with cameras. Some sit in the shade and just stare. A few lie full length, making daisy angels.

Namaqualand, also called the succulent Karoo, is a low-rainfall desert.

Every year the timing of the flowers and their quantities vary somewhat. But somewhere between August and the beginning of October, this dusty stretch of land springs to flowering life for a few intense weeks. 

Photographer Freeman Patterson describes this upwelling of colour perfectly: 'A sense of luxuriant abandon emanates from the land and fills the human spirit with delight.'

And it's not only the daisies that flower. Namaqualand is rich in bulb flora, and over 1 000 of the estimated 3 500 plant species that occur here are found nowhere else in the world.

To experience the heart of the succulent Karoo, there is the Caracal 4x4 Eco-route, over 180km long, that will take you deep into the park's newest lands.  

It ends right at the coast, in secret coves between the Groen and Spoeg rivers, where the estuaries are rich with birds, and where you may see the rare Heaviside's dolphin. Here you'll find that in spring even the beaches are edged with flowers.