West Coast

West Coast National Park was proclaimed in 1985 to protect some 25 kilometres of Atlantic coast, the Langebaan lagoon with its salt marshes, mudflats and rocky shores, the surrounding fynbos strandveld vegetation and four coastal islands. It covers some 32,000 hectares, about a hundred kilometres north of Cape Town, inland of the port of Saldanha.

Its main value is ornithological. The richness of marine invertebrates in the lagoon's mudflats supports a population of some 40,000 waders in summer, migrants arriving from places as distant as Greenland and Siberia. More than 250 bird species have been recorded in the park, including flamingos from Etosha, cormorants, 25% of the world population of Cape gannet and half of that of the swift tern, concentrated above all on the islands.

Inland live mountain zebra, eland, wildebeest and bontebok, and occasionally caracal, wildcat and bat-eared fox, along with the angulate tortoise, endemic to the region. The Postberg sector, closed the rest of the year, opens in August and September for the mass flowering of succulent and annual plants, one of the best-known botanical spectacles in South Africa. The lagoon is also a Ramsar site, and on its shores fossilised human footprints some 117,000 years old were found, among the oldest attributed to anatomically modern humans.