The Klein Karoo

The best way to experience the Karoo is by travelling its back roads and spending time savouring the vast open spaces, the indigo blue dome of the sky and the distinctive landscapes that merge into the shimmering horizon. The Karoo has many moods and its landscape can alter dramatically with the shifting seasons. The Karoo is a land of rolling mountains, often snow-capped in winter, vast plains that surround where you can almost see the curve of the earth’s surface as they merge with the distant horizon, the distinctively clean-shaped hills, capped in the hard rock resulting from millions of year’s erosion and dotted here and there, the small towns and villages that service the needs of the scattered communities of the Karoo.

The Karoo is broadly bounded in the south by the mountains of the Langeberg, the Outeniqua and the Kougaberge and in the west by the Cederberg and the Bokkeveldberge. In the east and north the Karoo’s boundaries are less defined, gradually merging with the extensive rolling grasslands of the Eastern Cape and bounded by the western edge of the Drakensberg Mountains and in the north by the Orange River, gradually merging into the shimmering and sun-drenched plains of Bushmanland and the Kaiingveld.