Franschhoek, The Huguenot Museum and The Monument

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If you drive through Franschhoek, you can't really miss the Huguenot Memorial Museum because it0s adjacent to the town's most obvious landmark, the Huguenot Monument, set in a prime position at the head of Huguenot Road, the main road through town.


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The monument consists of three skinny, interlocking arches symbolizing the Holy Trinity, while the museum gives comprehensive coverage of Huguenot history, culture and of their contribution to modern South Africa.


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The Western Cape, Franschhoek (2)

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Between 1688 and 1700, about two hundred French Huguenots, desperate to escape religious persecution in France, accepted a Dutch East India Company offer of passage to the Cape and the grant of lands.


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They made contact with the area's earliest settlers, groups of Khoi herders, whom the white settlers gradually dispossessed.

By 1713 white hegemony was established and the area was known as de france hoek.


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Though French-speaking died out within a generation, many of the estates are still known by their original French names.

Franschhoek itself occupies parts of the original farms of La Cotte and Cabrière and is relatively young, having been established around a church built in 1833.

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The Western Cape, Franschhoek (1)

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If eating, drinking and sleeping is what the Winelands is really about, then Franschhoek, 33km from Stellenbosch and 29km from Paarl, is the place that does it best.


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Despite being a fairly small dorp, it has managed to establish itself as the culinary capital of the Western Cape, if not the whole country.


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Its late Victorian and more recent Frenchified rustic architecture, the terrific setting - hemmed in on three sides by mountains - the vineyards down every other backstreet, and some vigorous myth-making have created a place you can really lose yourself in, a set piece that unashamedly draws its inspiration from Provence.


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Paarl, the Taal Monument

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The only other sight of any interest in Paarl itself is the grandiose Taal Monument, the apartheid-era memorial to the Afrikaans language, standing just outside the centre on the top of Paarl Mountain.

The monument used to be as important a place of pilgrimage for Afrikaners as the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria.

From the coffee and curio shop you can admire a truly magnificent panorama across to the Cape Peninsula and False Bay in one direction and the Winelands ranges in the other.

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Paarl, the Museum

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Housed in a handsome, thatched Cape Dutch building with one of the earliest surviving gables (1787) in the "new style", characterized by triangular caps, the contents of the Paarl Museum don't quite match up to its exterior.

It does include some reasonably enlightening panels on the architecture of the town, and several eccentric glass display cases of Victorian bric-a-brac.

There's also some coverage of the indigenous Khoisan populations of the area and the changes that came with European colonization, including slavery.

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Somerset West, Paarl (3)

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The town holds deep historical significance for the two competing political forces that forged modern South Africa.


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Afrikanerdom regards Paarl as the hallowed ground on which their language movement was born in 1875, while the ANC and everyone else remember it as the place from which Nelson Mandela made the final steps of his long walk to freedom, when he walked out of Groot Drakenstein Prison - then called Victor Verster - in 1990.


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Somerset West, Paarl (2)

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In 1657, five years after the establishment of the Cape settlement, a party under Abraham Gabbema arrived in the Berg River Valley to look for trading opportunities with the Khoikhoi, and search for the legendary gold of Monomotapa.


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With treasure on the brain, they awoke after a rainy night to see the silvery dome of granite dominating the valley; which they dubbed Peerlbergh (pearl mountain), which in its modified form, Paarl, became the name of the town.


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Thirty years later, the commander of the Cape, Simon van der Stel, granted strips of the Khoikhoi lands on the slopes of Paarl Mountain to French Huguenot and Dutch settlers.
By the time Paarl was granted town status in 1840, it was still an outpost at the edge of the Drakenstein Mountains, a flourishing wagon-making and last-stop provisioning centre.


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Somerset West, Paarl (1)

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Although Paarl is attractively ensconced in a fertile valley brimming with historic buildings, at heart it's a parochial dorp, lacking the sophistication of Stellenbosch or the striking setting of Franschhoek.


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It can claim some virtue, however, from being a prosperous farming centre that earns its keep from the agricultural industries - grain silos, canneries and flour mills - on the north side of town, and the cornucopia of grapes, guavas, olives, oranges and maize grown on the surrounding farms.


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Somerset West, Morgenster

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Apart from its exquisite rustic setting, the tasting room at Morgenster, Vergelegen's immediate neighbour, has a veranda that looks onto a lovely lake with hazy mountains in the distance.


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Its two stellar blended reds aside, the estate offers the unusual addition of olive tasting, with three types of olive, three types of oil  - including an award-winning cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil - and some delicious olive paste.

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Somerset West, Vergelegen (2)

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Vergelegen was the only wine estate visited by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II during her 1995 state visit to South Africa - a good choice, as there's enough here to occupy even a monarch for an easy couple of hours.


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The interpretive centre, just across the courtyard from the shop at the building entrance, provides a useful history and background to the estate.

Next door, the wine-tasting centre offers professionally run sampling with a brief talk through each label.


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The homestead, which was restored in 1917 to its current state by Lady Florence Phillips, wife of a Johannesburg mining magnate, can also be visited.


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The massive grounds, planted with chestnuts and camphor trees and with ponds around every corner, make this one of the most serene places in the Cape.


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Somerset West, Vergelegen (1)

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An absolute architectural treasure as well as producing a stunning range of wines, Vergelegen represents a notorious episode of corruption at the Cape in the early years of Dutch East India Company rule.


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Built by Willem Adriaan van der Stel, who became governor in 1699 after his father Simon retired, the estate formed a grand Renaissance complex in the middle of the wild backwater that was the Cape at the beginning of the eighteenth century.


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Willem Adriaan acquired the land illegaly and used Company slaves and resources to build Vergelegen and farm vast tracts of surrounding land.
He also abused his power as governor to corner most of the significant markets at the Cape.


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When the Company became aware of this, they sacked Willem Adriaan and ordered that Vergelegen be destroyed.
It's believed that the destruction wasn't fully carried out and the current building is thought to stand on the original foundations.


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Somerset West & Around

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The only compelling reasons to trawl out the unpromising town of Somerset West, 50km east of Cape Town along the N2, are for Vergelegen on Lourensford Road, and its immediate neighbour Morgenster, which are officially part of the Helderberg wine route, but can easily be included as an extension to a visit to Stellenbosch, 14km to the north.


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The Winelands, Stellenbosch (3)

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The Village Museum: 

Stellenbosch's museum highlight is the extremely enjoyable Village Museum, which cuts a cross section through the town's architectural and social heritage by means of four adjacent dwellings from different periods, including the Blettermanhuis, an archetypal eighteenth-century Cape Dutch house.
They're beautifully conserved and furnished in period style, and you'll meet the odd worker dressed in period costume.


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Dorp Street:

Dorp Street, Stellenbosch's best-preserved historic axis, is well worth a stroll just to soak in the ambience of buildings, glabes, oaks and roadside water furrows.

Krige's Cottages, an unusual terrace of historic town houses, between Aan-de-Wagenweg and Krige Street, were built as Cape Dutch cottages in the first half of the nineteenth century; Victorian features were added subsequently, resulting in an interesting hybrid, with gables housing Victorian attic windows and decorative Victorian verandas with filigree ironwork fronting the elegantly simple Dutch facades.



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The Winelands, Stellenbosch (2)

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One of Simon van der Stel's first actions after arriving at the Cape in 1679 to assume the governorship was to explore the area along the Eerste River (literally "the first river"), where he came upon an enchanting little valley.


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Within a month it appeared on maps as Stellenbosch ("Stel's bush"), the first of several places around the Cape that he was to name after himself or members of his family; another was Simonsberg overlooking the town.


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Charged by the Dutch East India Company with opening up the Cape interior, Van der Stel soon settled the first free burghers in Stellenbosch.
Within eight years, sixty freehold grants had been made and within two decades Stellenbosch was a prosperous , semi-feudal society dominated by landowners.


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In 1702 the Danish traveller, Abraham Bogaert, admired how it had "grown with fine dwellings, and how great a treasure of wine and grain is grown here".
By the end of the century there were over a thousand houses and some substantial burgher estates in and around Stellenbosh, many of which still exist.


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