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South Africa: Cape Floral Region – South Africa’s Wild Heart
🌿 South Africa: Cape Floral Region – South Africa’s Wild Heart
🌍 The World’s Hottest Hot-Spot for Plant Life
We’ve visited a fair few UNESCO World Heritage Sites in our time, and most of them follow a fairly predictable pattern — a ruined temple here, a stretch of ancient city wall there. But every now and then you come across one that does things a bit differently, and the Cape Floral Protected Region is very much in that category. Rather than a single site, it is a collection — an archipelago, to use the technical term — of eight protected areas strung across the Western and Eastern Cape of South Africa, chosen because together they capture as much as possible of one of the most extraordinary concentrations of plant life anywhere on the planet.
The numbers, frankly, make your head spin. The entire Cape Floral Region covers roughly 90,000 square kilometres, which sounds enormous until you realise that amounts to less than 0.38 per cent of the total land area of Africa. And yet crammed into that relatively modest patch of the continent you will find nearly 20 per cent of Africa’s entire flora — 8,996 plant species across 988 genera, with 32 per cent of those species found absolutely nowhere else on Earth. Five of Africa’s twelve endemic plant families call this region home. It was formally inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004, with the serial listing extended and consolidated in 2015 to better reflect the full ecological range of conditions, soil types, rainfall patterns and altitude that make the region so botanically remarkable. The dominant vegetation type across much of it is fynbos — a word from the Afrikaans for “fine bush” — an extraordinarily diverse shrubland that has evolved over millions of years in response to the region’s infertile soils and seasonal, Mediterranean-style rainfall.
The region stretches from the Cederberg Wilderness in the north all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope at Africa’s south-western tip, taking in the Boland Mountains, De Hoop Nature Reserve, the dramatic Swartberg range, the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve, and reaching eastwards as far as Baviaanskloof. During our tour of South Africa, we were lucky enough to visit a few of these areas ourselves, and what follows is a brief account of what we found.
1. Table Mountain
We had seen photographs of Table Mountain all our lives, of course — it is one of those images so ingrained in the collective consciousness that you almost feel you know it before you arrive. The reality, though, is something else entirely. The mountain forms a flat-topped, utterly distinctive massif rising to 1,086 metres above sea level and looming over Cape Town with a quiet authority that no photograph quite manages to convey. It was first formally climbed by the Portuguese navigator António de Saldanha in 1503, making it one of the earliest recorded ascents of any mountain in southern Africa, and it has been a navigational landmark for sailors rounding the Cape ever since. Today it forms the centrepiece of the Table Mountain National Park, declared in 1998, and the cableway — opened as far back as 1929 and completely rebuilt in 1997 with the revolving cars that visitors use today — whisks you to the summit in a matter of minutes. The plateau at the top is home to some 1,470 plant species in its own right, more than are found in the entire United Kingdom.
2. Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens
We had seen photographs of Table Mountain all our lives, of course — it is one of those images so ingrained in the collective consciousness that you almost feel you know it before you arrive. The reality, though, is something else entirely. The mountain forms a flat-topped, utterly distinctive massif rising to 1,086 metres above sea level and looming over Cape Town with a quiet authority that no photograph quite manages to convey. It was first formally climbed by the Portuguese navigator António de Saldanha in 1503, making it one of the earliest recorded ascents of any mountain in southern Africa, and it has been a navigational landmark for sailors rounding the Cape ever since. Today it forms the centrepiece of the Table Mountain National Park, declared in 1998, and the cableway — opened as far back as 1929 and completely rebuilt in 1997 with the revolving cars that visitors use today — whisks you to the summit in a matter of minutes. The plateau at the top is home to some 1,470 plant species in its own right, more than are found in the entire United Kingdom.
3. Cape of Good Hope
There is something genuinely stirring about standing at the Cape of Good Hope, even if you have to share the car park with approximately four hundred other tourists and a colony of baboons that have absolutely no interest in personal space or packed lunches. The cape was first rounded by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias in 1488, who — not unreasonably, given the conditions — named it the Cabo das Tormentas, the Cape of Storms. It was King John II of Portugal who gave it the rather more optimistic name we know today, recognising its strategic significance as the gateway to a sea route to India that Vasco da Gama would finally complete in 1498. In 1580, Sir Francis Drake sailed past on his circumnavigation of the globe and declared it “the fairest cape in all the world,” which tells you something about either his standards or the extraordinary quality of the light on a clear day. Today the cape forms part of the Table Mountain National Park, and the surrounding fynbos-covered peninsula is as fine a walking landscape as you will find anywhere in southern Africa — provided the baboons leave your sandwiches alone.
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