1 Blyde River Canyon
2 Cape Peninsula
3 Drakensberg
4 The Garden Route
5 Golden Gate Highlands National Park
6 Kimberley's Big Hole
7 Kruger National Park
8 Namaqualand Flowers
9 Robben Island
10 Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, Cape Town
In their frenzy to discover diamonds, miners created the world's largest man-made excavation, the Big Hole, between 1871 and 1914.
In 1869 diamonds were discovered at Bultfontein, near the place which grew into the city of Kimberley, in the Northern Cape. Two years later the diamond-diggers' attention shifted to an insignificant-looking nearby hillock, Colesberg Koppie. Very soon the hill had disappeared into a huge pit.
What the diggers had stumbled on was the mouth of an enormous, ancient volcanic vent filled with a bluish clay-like substance, a so-called kimberlite pipe. This one was extraordinarily rich in diamonds. Over the 43 years that the pipe was worked no fewer than 2,720kg of diamonds were taken from it. All that was left here when the mining stopped was the 800m-deep Big Hole. Even today, when it is filled with water to within 174m of the top, the Big Hole is an awe-inspiring sight, with a circumference of 1.6km, and a surface area of more than 13ha. But take a look at the old black-and-white photographs of the diggings, on view in the Kimberley Mine Museum on the rim of the hole. Here you get a real sense of what it was like in the old days, with hundreds of aerial ropeways reaching down from the edge of the pipe to the masses of diggers below.Address: Tucker Street, Kimberley, Northern Cape
Phone: 053-839 4901/2
Open: Daily, summer 8-6; winter 8-4
Restaurant: Restaurant (Inexpensive)
Air: Fly to Kimberley
Accessible: Phone in advance
Admission: Moderate
Info: Kimberley Tourist Office Address: 121 Bultfontein Street Phone: 053-832 7298; e-mail: tourism@kbymun.org.za
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