Blyde River Canyon
Interesting facts
- The three peaks of the Three Rondavels carry the names of Chief Maripi's wives: Magabolle, Mogoladikwe and Maseroto.
- The Blyde River flat gecko, discovered in 1991, is known only from the cliff face of one of the Three Rondavels.
- Only about 200 wild plants of the Blyde River cycad are thought to survive, all within this small corner of the escarpment.
- Every non-human primate native to South Africa lives in the canyon, including both bushbabies, vervet monkeys and the samango monkey.
- The cliffs at God's Window appear in the 1980 cult comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy.
- Annual rainfall across the reserve varies enormously, from about 540 mm in the dry valley to nearly 2,800 mm on the misty heights.
- Mariepskop takes its name from the Pulana chief Maripe Mashile, whose people used the mountain as a stronghold during the upheavals of the Mfecane.
- A military radar station operated on the summit of Mariepskop from 1965 until it was abandoned in 2003.
- Native forest covers about 2,100 hectares of the reserve, scattered in roughly 60 separate patches clinging to the wetter slopes.
- The Treur River, meaning 'mourning river', got its name from trekkers who wrongly believed Hendrik Potgieter's party had died on its journey.
Why it is worth it
The Blyde River Canyon cuts some 26 km through the edge of the Drakensberg escarpment in Mpumalanga, and it is usually ranked the third-largest canyon on Earth after the Grand Canyon and the Fish River Canyon. What sets it apart from both is colour: this is a green canyon, its walls and floor thick with subtropical bush and forest rather than bare rock. The river has worked down through quartzite, shale and dolomite of the ancient Transvaal rocks, laid down around 2.5 billion years ago, leaving walls that drop, on average, some 750 to 800 metres.
The name goes back to 1844, when a party of Voortrekkers led by Hendrik Potgieter returned safely to this river; "blyde" is old Dutch for glad or happy, and in 2005 the river itself was renamed the Motlatse. It meets the Treur River at Bourke's Luck Potholes, where swirling water charged with pebbles has drilled deep cylindrical basins into the bedrock; footbridges cross directly above them. The spot is named after the prospector Bernard Thomas Bourke, who hoped for gold here.
Further along the rim stand the Three Rondavels, grass-capped rock towers shaped like the round thatched huts of the region. Local tradition links them to a nineteenth-century chief, Maripi, and his wives, and the flat-topped peak beside them is known as the chief himself. On the southern escarpment, God's Window looks over cliffs falling more than 700 metres to the Lowveld, and on clear days the view runs towards the Kruger National Park and the Lebombo Mountains. Down in the gorge, the Kadishi Tufa Falls pour over a curtain of mineral deposit around 200 metres tall, counted among the highest tufa waterfalls in the world, while the Blyde River Dam fills the lower canyon with still water.
The whole landscape is protected within the Blyde River Canyon Nature Reserve, created in 1965 and covering roughly 29,000 hectares. Around a thousand plant species grow here, including an endemic protea, and the reserve's high point is the massif of Mariepskop at 1,944 metres. Baboons, kudu and mountain reedbuck live along the slopes, and hippos and crocodiles in the reservoir.
Getting there
The canyon lies about 29 km from Acornhoek; the scenic Panorama Route along its rim starts in the small town of Graskop, and viewpoints such as God's Window, Bourke's Luck Potholes and the Three Rondavels are reached by road along the escarpment. The nearest airport is Eastgate Airport at Hoedspruit (HDS), about 34 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Blyde River Canyon is a 26 km long canyon located in Mpumalanga, South Africa. It is the third-largest canyon on Earth, behind the Grand Canyon and the Fish River Canyon Unlike the Grand and Fish River Canyon, the Blyde River Canyon is a "green canyon" which is dominated by subtropical vegetation. The canyon forms part of the Blyde River Canyon Nature Reserve.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
-24.56389, 30.80750per Wikidata