TRAVEL NORTHERN CAPE
Come and see the beautiful South African province of NORTHERN CAPE, and experience all that this picturesque land has to offer, all while engaging in a High Performance Rugby Programme.
The Griquas Rugby Institute is housed at the heart of Kimberley. It is the capital city of the Northern Cape and surrounded by five of South Africa’s big rivers, two of them being the Orange and Vaal Rivers. Kimberley is a prospecting city famous for its quality diamonds, the largest man-made excavation in the world and impressive variety of tourists attractions. Kimberley is renowned for the “Big Hole”, which is 1.5 km in circumference. This, in fact, is the old Kimberley Mine, which was the richest diamond-producing mine in the world!
Kimberley has an average of 9.4 hours of sunshine per day throughout the year and receive an annual rainfall of about 450 mm. Fascinatingly enough, Kimberley is situated in the centre of South Africa, almost exactly halfway between Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Surrounding Kimberley are many memorials and sites of some important battles of the Anglo-Boer war, most notably the Siege of Kimberley in 1899 with the famous “Long Cecil” on display, and the battlefield site of Magersfontein where Boer General used trench warfare for the first time. The city boasts other firsts like the first city in the Southern Hemisphere to install electric street lighting and the first city in South Africa to switch to an automatic exchange, and it housed the country’s first Stock Exchange.
