Hermanus Travel Guide

Hermanus is a picture-postcard destination in every sense of the word: just 122km from Cape Town, this gorgeous town boasts incredible scenery, astounding views, one of South Africa’s most stunning national parks, and a surfeit of excellent bars and restaurants guaranteed to satisfy even the fussiest of gastronomes. The nearby Hemel-en-Aarde Valley is the source of South Africa’s finest Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

Today, Hermanus is a thriving and universally popular resort town, yet its history is relatively short by the standards of the Western Cape. The wider region was first discovered in the 15th Century when the Portuguese explorer Bartholomeu Dias sailed to the Cape from West Africa. His successor, Vasco de Gama, sailed past what we today know as Cape Town. However, the Portuguese explorer Antonio de Saldanha was the first to coin the name Table Mountain in the 16th Century.

The Arrival of European Settlers

In the 17th Century, the Western Cape rapidly became a magnet for European settlers and religious groups, such as Huguenots (protestants) looking to escape persecution in their native France. They were welcomed to the Cape with open arms, mainly as they boasted valuable viticultural expertise primarily responsible for kick-starting the thriving wine industry South Africa enjoys today.

In the early 19th Century, the British (one of the key groups involved in colonizing the Cape) annexed the region in 1806. Of course, this immediately caused escalating tensions with the Boers (descendants of the Dutch settlers) and the native Zulu tribes, who eventually went to war in 1880.

However, earlier that Century, a Dutch teacher, Hermanus Pieters, arrived in what we today know as Hermanus in 1815 and settled in the town of Caledon. He was recruited by Dutch farmers, concerned that the English language was taking over the local culture, to teach Dutch to the next generation of farmers and their children.

The Discovery of Hemel-en-Aarde Valley

Pieters is also credited with ‘discovering’ the Hemel-en-Aarde valley – known then as Elephant’s Pass – as the perfect site for farmers to graze their livestock in the summer months. After that, a growing number of farmers took his lead, including fishermen who helped to turn Hermanus into a permanent settlement in the 19th Century.

The settlement was originally named Hermanuspietersfontein until 1902, when the postmaster shortened the name to just Hermanus – the thriving fishing village subsequently received official municipality status in 1904. Yet its future prosperity would not derive from fishing but from tourism and its reputation as an ideal location for rest and recuperation spread by doctors in London. In 1902, the town’s first hotel, The Victoria, opened and soon became a massive hit with the British upper classes looking to escape the dreaded winter back home.

Meanwhile, after the defeat of the Boers in the Second Boer War, a new era dawned for Cape Town after the Union of South Africa was created in 1910. Sadly, much of the 20th Century in South Africa would subsequently be defined by apartheid, a political movement to divide the nation based on color and ethnicity.

The New Era of Hermanus

Thankfully, in the early 1990s, recently elected president FW de Klerk set about dismantling apartheid, and Nelson Mandela became president of a newly united and optimistic South Africa in 1994. Since that day, Hermanus has prospered as a major tourist destination and a gateway to the magnificent Hemel-en-Aarde wine region – perhaps the greatest source of Pinot Noir outside of Burgundy. Indeed, the region’s beautiful wineries and vineyards are a fitting introduction to Hermanus itself; prosperous, proud, and inviting, they are a suitable poster child for South Africa today.