Beautiful South Africa

South Africa, larger than Holland, Belgium, Italy, France and western Germany combined, and a country of immense natural resources, is a regional superpower, the engine room of the subcontinent´s economy. It is also rich in beauty, stunning in its myriad contrasts, though in the broadest terms it has just two physical divisions: the vast interior plateau, and the narrow coastal belt that fringes it. Between them is the conspicuous, and continuous, necklace of mountains known as the Great Escarpment, which reaches its grandest heights in the towering Drakensberg range to the east.

JOHANNESBURG

Johannesburg is South Africa´s largest city and the industrial and financial hub of a country that is emerging, painfully but with bright promise, from the darkness of the apartheid era. This is a nation of some 40 million people and of bewildering human diversity, the contrasts vividly evident in the mix of race and language , creed, colour, culture and economic status. Variety is there, too, in the physical nature of the land: in its widely differing climates, its regions of high mountain peaks and broad grassland plains, its rugged coasts and the semi-arid flatlands of the great interior, its game-rich bushveld and the lovely hills and valleys of the south, each of the many parts displaying its own, highly distinctive characters.

PRETORIA

Pretoria, 60 km to the north of Johannesburg, is a beautiful city, famed for its feathery, lilac-coloured jacaranda trees which put on a resplendent display in spring, and its stately buildings, among them the Union Buildings with the famous statue of Louis Botha, first prime minister of the Union of South Africa. Tradition of a wholly different kind can be seen in Ndebele villages near Middleburg, some distance to the east of Pretoria.

THE KRUGER NATIONAL PARK

The Kruger National Park occupies nearly 20,000 square kilometres of Lowveld bush country to the east of the northern Drakensberg, and is haven to more varieties of wildlife than any other game sanctuary in Africa. Among its 148 mammal species are lion, warthog and the lordly giraffe.

Thanks a lot, Abdu!