Place to stay · Hardap
BüllsPort Lodge & Farm
Family-run sheep and horse farm at the foot of the Naukluft Mountains, 230 km from Windhoek. Twelve lodge rooms, two remote campsites, 14 marked hiking trails and guided horse rides.
BüllsPort is a guest farm at the foot of the Naukluft Mountains, about 230 km from Windhoek on the way to Sossusvlei. Ernst and Johanna Sauber opened it with five rooms in 1993, and they still run it alongside sheep and horses. It’s a place for walkers and riders, and the farm itself says one night is too short. Two or three nights makes more sense.
What to expect
The lodge has 12 en-suite rooms, two of them triples and two family rooms. Rooms are on grid power with air conditioning, a fridge, a coffee station and a terrace, and the toilet is separate from the shower. Wifi reaches the rooms, mobile signal is weak. Dinner is a three-course farm menu, often on the terrace, using vegetables from the garden and milk from the farm’s cows.
There are 14 marked trails, from an hour along the Tsondab dry river to a seven-hour hike up to the plateau and down the Quiver Tree Gorge. Self-guided trails, and a marked 4x4 trail if you have your own four-wheel drive, are free for guests. Paid extras include a guided drive and walk to the Bogenfels rock arch, horse rides from 30 minutes to about seven hours, a farm drive, a visit to ǂNabasib Primary School and a Sossusvlei day trip.
Practical details
- Phone: +264 63 293 371. Email: info@buellsport.com.
- Dinner and breakfast are included in the lodge rate.
- The camping is about 3 km from the lodge: two sites with two pitches each, hot showers from a wood boiler, no electricity and no phone signal.
Good to know
BüllsPort closes every summer, roughly from November or late November to the start of February, because it’s too hot to hike and ride. The exact dates change each year and are on its price list. Riders have a 90 kg weight limit, and horse rides should be booked ahead.
Last updated 7 October 2026. Sources: BüllsPort Lodge and Farm, BüllsPort Lodge and Farm, lodge, BüllsPort Lodge and Farm, camping, BüllsPort Lodge and Farm, hiking, BüllsPort Lodge and Farm, riding, BüllsPort Lodge and Farm, hosts, BüllsPort Lodge and Farm, rates and booking.
Bul se Poort: a soldier's grave and too many zebra
The gap in the hills where the farm sits had a Khoekhoegowab name first, Gob Ams, the bull’s mouth. Afrikaans speakers turned that into Bul se Poort, the bull’s gate, and German spelling made it Büllsport, which means nothing at all. The hill at the mouth of the valley is still called Bull’s Head.
What 1894 left behind
Hendrik Witbooi and his Oorlam-Nama fighters fought the German Schutztruppe in these mountains in 1894, until he signed a conditional surrender at Gurus on 15 September. At the valley end of the Quiver Tree Gorge trail are the ruins of a colonial police post, and beside them two graves. One is a German soldier’s from that campaign. The other, by the farm’s account, is a police officer killed in 1915 after the Baster rising, as South African troops pushed into the colony.
The Saubers’ history of the place says the first farm here was plundered while its owner was away fighting those South Africans, and that the next farmer was interned in the Second World War. In 1950 a widow, Anna Sauber, bought Büllsport for her son Hermann. Ernst is the third generation.
A mountain that moved
In the 1930s two young German geologists, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn, drew the first geological maps of the Naukluft. What they mapped is a stack of rock that is not where it was formed. By the farm’s figures it is a block 68 km long and 28 km wide that slid about 78 km on a layer of salty sediment before coming to rest roughly 495 million years ago.
That matters to a walker because the dolomite is full of holes. Rain sinks in and comes out lower down as springs, which is why a farm with under 120 mm of rain a year has a gorge with fig trees, standing pools and red dragonflies.
How likely you are to see zebra
About half of Expert Africa’s travellers since mid-2018 report Hartmann’s mountain zebra at BüllsPort, and roughly a quarter report oryx. The zebra are on the mountain side of the farm, about 43 square kilometres that the Saubers keep as a reserve with no livestock, so the guided drive up to the plateau that starts the gorge walk is your best chance. Several visitors describe getting close to a group on it. People who only do the self-guided walks more often list baboons, kudu, klipspringer and dassies. One traveller in late August 2022 saw a wary group with young foals halfway up the slopes.
Two walkers, in 2014 and 2016, reported leopard prints in the gorge. The cat itself is rare enough that the farm made a news item of it in August 2025, when a family being driven up to the plateau watched a young one run up the opposite slope in daylight.
The zebra are also the farm’s problem. The Saubers reckon the neighbouring Namib-Naukluft park holds about 4,000, twice the ceiling experts have set for it. That is their estimate, but a Newcastle University camera-trap study had identified more than 3,000 individuals in the park’s mountains by 2019. Hungry zebra break the boundary fence and end up on the grazing. In 2020, with years of drought on top of that, Ernst sold his core herd of 57 cattle. Sheep graze the plains now.
Cold beds and a tree called Miss Naukluft
Winter visitors have said the same thing for years: the nights are bitterly cold. One party in July 2008 reported minus 4, and they and another in July 2015 wished for hot water bottles. The rooms were remodelled in 2016 and 2017, but the altitude has not changed. Pack warm for midwinter.
The farm keeps a numbered register of its quiver trees. They can be adopted to help pay for the reserve, and number 001 has a name, Miss Naukluft.
