Fraserburg

Fraserburg was established in 1851 on the farm Rietfontein, named after Reverend Colin Fraser, a Scottish immigrant minister who served the remote farming community of the upper Karoo. The town sits on a flat plateau at 1,385 metres, surrounded by the open semi-desert of the Karoo Hoogland. The Nuweveld Mountains lie to the south. The San people were the original inhabitants of this plateau, and the first European settlers arrived in the area around 1760, bringing sheep and little else.

Fraserburg is part of the same municipality as Sutherland and Williston, the Karoo Hoogland, and the three towns share the character of isolated Karoo plateau settlements with exceptional night skies. The altitude and dry air produce some of the darkest skies in the province outside Sutherland itself. There is no formal observatory, but stargazers who show up with their own equipment find conditions that are hard to match.

The town has a small museum and the typical Dutch Reformed church and wide main street of a Karoo dorp. The surrounding landscape is classic upper Karoo: flat, rocky, with sparse vegetation and a light that changes dramatically across the day. Fossil finds have been made in the surrounding district, consistent with the broader Karoo fossil belt that extends across this part of the province.

There are a handful of guesthouses and farm stays in and around Fraserburg. The roads in are long and the nearest larger town is Sutherland to the west or Carnarvon to the north. People who come here come deliberately. Most find the isolation exactly what they were looking for.