The Diamond Fields region is naturally named-after, and most famous for, these sparkling gems that were wrenched from the earth during the Kimberly diamond rush in the late 19th Century. Imagine the extraordinary system required back then, for thirty thousand miners to work over 3600 claims over a 17-hectare area (34 football fields) ….and create the largest hand-dug hole in the world. Pulley cables led to a six-storey staging platform surrounded by a tent-city and the odd building in a time when pubs outnumbered other retail enterprises. By the time the mine closed after 40-odd years in 1914, 22.5million tons of earth had been removed and 2722 kilograms of diamonds had been extracted from the Big Hole. Not bad for a bunch of blokes with picks and shovels! Today, the city of Kimberley has many signs of these days of glory. You just have to wander around the suburb of Belgravia, with its exquisite architecture, or visit the elegant upmarket Kimberley Club to get a taste of what life was like back then. Kimberley is a good place to ease into the laid-back pace of the Northern Cape province – it’s a small city with plentiful history and legends plus all the shops and facilities required for modern life today. The Diamond Fields region includes the Anglo-Boer War battlefields route, which takes in Magersfontein amongst many other battlefields, and the McGregor Museum in Kimberley also has much info on this war. Not far from Kimberley lies Barkly West, where alluvial diamond diggings are still in existence today; and at Hartswater on the border of the Northern Cape and North West provinces, the million-year-old Taung Skull was discovered in 1924. The region also encompasses the Vaalharts Valley, one of the world’s largest irrigation schemes fed by the Vaal and Harts rivers, that provides water to over 1250 farms. An agri-tourism route is currently being developed. --- By Brent Naudé-Moseley
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