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AttractionsGraaff-Reinet is the oldest established town in the Eastern Cape and the fourth oldest in South Africa. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Dutch Burghers began to leave the settlement around Cape Town and the authorities tried to keep up with them as they moved into the vast African interior.
These Burghers became known as Trek Boers and were noted, amongst other things, for their hardy independent character, a disdain for authority and their perpetual disagreements with the taxman.
In an effort to keep some control over their subjects, in 1786 the authorities established an administrative centre, or Drostdy, in a picturesque setting in the arid Great Karoo where the Sundays River flows from the Sneeuberg Mountains. This centre they named after the Governor of the Cape, and his wife Reinet.
In the 1830s there was a mass movement of Boers away from the Cape Colony to lands to the North where the Boers hoped to establish Republics where they would be an independent people. This was the Great Trek which had such huge ramifications on the history of South Africa.
The vast majority of those who embarked on the Great Trek came from the Eastern Cape. One of the Graaff-Reinet trekkers, Andries Pretorius, commanded the Boer forces at the Battle of Blood River and later became the first President of the South African Republic. The capital of South Africa, Pretoria, was named after him.
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Schanskraal Country Manor & Lodge
049 842-2326
049 842-1719
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