Great Karoo park gets more land

A step has been taken towards the creation of a mega-conservation area in the great Karoo, with the addition of over 4,600 hectares of land to the 14,500ha Camdeboo National Park near the town of Graaff-Reinet in the eastern Cape. The Camdeboo National Park (formerly the Karoo Nature Reserve) was donated to Sanparks by the World Wide Fund for Nature – South Africa last October, fulfilling one of the late Dr Anton Rupert’s dreams.

When the new national park was announced environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said that they hoped to eventually link the park up with the Mountain Zebra National Park. Camdeboo’s park manager Peter Burdettt said, “The new property is a valuable addition to the park, not only in terms of expanding the conservation area, but also in terms of its aesthetic value as it borders on our most popular tourist attraction, the Valley of Desolation.”

A poverty relief programme is on the cards to rehabilitate areas of the park that have suffered from overuse in the past, and the removal of fences with the new Winterhoek properties will be carefully planned to allow sensitive areas to recover.