Place to stay · Grünau
Grunau Country Hotel
Well-known roadside hotel in Grünau in the far south, with en-suite rooms, glamping rooms, caravan sites, a bar, a restaurant and a pool, about 90 km from the Fish River Canyon.
The Grunau Country Hotel is the best-known stop in Grünau, the tiny ǁKaras settlement where the B1 from Noordoewer and the B3 from Nakop meet. For many drivers coming up from South Africa it is the first night in Namibia. The hotel changed hands in March 2018 and the new owners have since redone the place, the menu included. It is about 90 km from the Fish River Canyon, so it also works as a base for a canyon day trip.
What to expect
Three kinds of room. Standard rooms are en-suite: six twin or double rooms, two four-bed family rooms and two five-bed family rooms. The glamping rooms (eight with two single beds, two with four) have air-conditioning, bedding, towels and a coffee station, but share the bathrooms with the campsite. There are six caravan and camping sites with water and power.
The restaurant is à la carte and licensed, and the bar has satellite TV and a pool table. There is a pool, a play area for children, laundry, and braai packs, ice and wood for sale. Whole or half lambs can be ordered ahead.
Practical details
- Phone: +264 81 230 9804 or +264 81 727 9144. Email grunauch@iway.na.
- Address: 10 Old Main Road, Grünau.
- Check-in is from 2pm to 9pm and check-out by 10am, according to LekkeSlaap.
- The hotel arranges shuttles and day tours.
Good to know
Grünau’s groundwater is poor, and a small desalination plant was put up in 2020 to deal with it, so you may prefer bottled water.
Last updated 7 October 2026. Sources: Grunau Country Hotel, Grunau Country Hotel, accommodation, Grunau Country Hotel, facilities, Grunau Country Hotel, contact, LekkeSlaap, Grunau Country Hotel, Wikipedia, Grünau, Namibia.
A hotel bar in a village that once split 95 votes to 92
In Namibia’s first local elections after independence, in 1992, Grünau voted for a seven-seat village council. SWAPO took it with 95 votes. The DTA got 92. That is the size of the place the Grunau Country Hotel stands in, and it has not grown into much more: the settlement is laid out on 74 hectares, and before the 1998 elections it lost its village status altogether and was handed to the regional council to run.
Named for grass that comes with the rain
German settlers founded Grünau in 1902 and called it “green meadow” for the way the plain looks once rain has fallen. The railway arrived in 1909 on its way from Keetmanshoop to what is now Karasburg, and in 1915 the line was pushed on to Upington in South Africa. The station building is still there, out of use. Travellers come by road now, some from a long way off. One 2018 trip report on a South African overlanding forum has a driver leaving Cape Town in the morning, crossing at Vioolsdrif and Noordoewer, and checking in at the hotel just in time for a drink before dinner.
An hour and a half of water a morning
Water decides a lot about what Grünau can be. In 2010 The Namibian reported that the 900 or so residents had running water from half past seven to nine each morning, fed by about 30 cubic metres a day, and that many of them could not put in a flush toilet because of it. People with their own tanks filled them in that window. Everyone else made do. Nine years later the local councillor said the settlement needed 30 cubic metres a day and was getting 25.
Even the fuel has had its bad day. In February 2011 three cars, one of them driven by a reporter from the same paper, stalled on the Shell forecourt with water in their petrol. Nobody could say for certain how it got there, though floodwater in the storage tank was the guess, and a local mechanic had to drain and flush each tank before anyone could leave.
The hotel has been pulled into local life in odd ways too. In May 2020, when people coming back from South Africa were being held at lodges across the region, eight of them sat out their Covid quarantine in it. Four more were at Grünau Chalets.
Extras from the hostel, and a house built with carted water
In March 2006 a German crew filming at the Fish River Canyon used children from Grünau’s Immanuel Hostel as extras. The hostel had 51 boarders then, and broken water pipes, so the children fetched water in buckets. The actress Mareike Carrière brought food and toys, and the matron told the paper it was the first good turn she had seen in her five years there.
The older story is out on the farms. In 1912 Frederich Haschke built a white farmhouse near Grünau with Oregon pine floors and ceilings and roof tiles brought in through Lüderitz, hauling every drop of water from a place called Grabwasser. He and his bride Maria went back to Germany soon after. Travel News Namibia, which told the story in 2004, says the house stood empty until 1996, when its owners turned it into a guesthouse during the drought of the nineties. There is a koppie of rose quartz on the farm, and the veld around it is where people go to look for Lithops karasmontana, the 4 cm “living stone” named after the Great Karas Mountains. It looks like two grey pebbles until autumn, when it puts out a white flower.
