Hermanus Facts
Hermanus Village Square restaurants, bars and cafes
Hermanus Old Harbour
African art markets, Hermanus
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The Christmas period is when tourists descend in large numbers, as not only is it Christmas holidays, its summer with the weather being excellent, but it is also the SA annual school holidays. Most businesses in the interior of South Africa, especially up in Gauteng, Jo’burg and Pretoria, close for a whole month over this festive season. These holiday makers hit the coast all the way from Sodwana Bay, down thro’ Durban, Port Elizabeth, the Garden Route, the Overberg and Hermanus to Cape Town and the West Coast.
The local Hermanus Municipality mentioned that last Christmas, Hermanus received over 220,000 holiday makers. So that literally triples the town’s inhabitants. You try finding a spare bed at a guest house, a car parking space or an empty restaurant table during this month, with traffic jams being a daily occurrence too. Best to book everything in advance. Pro-active Re-cycling – Have you ever noticed the lack of rubbish on the streets of any city, town or village that you have visited in South Africa? Well theres a very good reason for that and that is because South Africa has a very good recycling plan. Hermanus for example, recycles over 4,000 tons of paper, plastic, glass, tins, cardboard and packaging each year. Not only does this save a huge amount of space in the landfill sites but it also creates over 35 fulltime jobs at the processing plant. It’s also a lot less hassle than in Europe, where you have a recycling box for every single type of waste. In South Africa you just have one clear recycling bag and you throw everything into that, which in turn gets sorted at the processing plant. In fact over 5,000 recycle bags are handed out in Hermanus to homes and businesses each year. Alien vegetation (invasive plants that are not South African species) are also cleared and is also recycled to be turned into compost. Hermanus processes over 20,000m2 of bush chippings each year. Water - finding new water supplies via bore-holes..... As we all know, water is a scarce resource, thankfully afew years ago, a huge underground water aquifer was discovered in Hermanus at the Gateway area. Some 1.5 million m³ per year of underground water has now been added to the existing 2.8 million m³ per year that is obtained from the towns main dam at De Bos, which was formerly the only water source for the Greater Hermanus area. The new water project, boasting cutting-edge technology, cost some R5.5m to develop and has now been found to be one of the highest yielding in South Africa – blowing out at more than 100 litres/second – and the infrastructure such as pumps, a pipeline and a pre-treatment plant (to ensure water quality) are now fully constructed and operational. (courtesy of - http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2008/august/borehole.htm) Please click our Articles Main Menu Page to view our extensive library of South Africa tourism related Articles and Things to See and Do.
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