Welcome
to the "City of Diamonds". In 1871,
diamond deposits found on a hillock dubbed Colesberg
Kopje on the farm Vooruitzicht, owned by the
De Beers brothers, led to a mad scramble for
fame and fortune and the world’s largest,
hand-dug excavation, the colossal Kimberley
Mine or Big Hole.
Kimberley
is now a modern city and the diamond capital
of the world. The city played an important part
during the Anglo-Boer Wars, and the city's museums
are a must to the visitor. Included in these
has to be the Kimberley Mine Museum Village
and Big Hole, where the visitor will find many
original and reconstructed buildings that demonstrate
what life was like in a boom town more than
a century ago.
The
town was renamed Kimberley, after the Earl of
Kimberley, British Secretary of State for the
Colonies. Despite the town’s severe dose
of diamond dementia, it was, by 1900, a prosperous
town. Its complex, higgledypiggledy web of roads
is a topographic reminder of a chaotic past.
And not one, but five big holes, and a number
of smaller mines, had been gouged out of the
earth, reaching ever deeper into its bluish,
diamond-bearing Kimberlite pipes! The Kimberley
Mine was closed in 1914. Covering 17ha, it reached
a depth of 1 097m and yielded three tons of
diamonds. A bawdy shanty town born of a desperation
and greed redolent of the American Wild West,
Kimberley swiftly donned a mantle of architectural
elegance.
Today,
it is a prosperous, thriving metropolis with
Victorian buildings that complement the more
modern buildings of the CBD. Lacking the furious
pace of South Africa’s larger urban giants,
it is perhaps the country’s most innovative
town. Home of our first flying school, our first
stock exchange and the first city in the Southern
Hemisphere to install electric street-lighting,
it is mining a brilliant future from a glorious
past.
Activities
Kimberley
Mine Museum Village and Big Hole
Kimberley
Ghost Trail
Visit the haunted corners of a city that was
plagued by war and mine disasters.
Tel 052 832 7298
Kimberley
Club
Du Toitspan Rd. A national monument since 1984,
the Kimberley Club was established in August
1881. Among its more illustrious past members,
it counts CJ Rhodes, Leander Starr Jameson,
Charles Dunnell Rudd, Barney Barnato, Sir Ernest
and Harry Oppenheimer. Tel 053 8324 224
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