Pella

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Pella Cathedral, Northern Cape.

© Chris Marais

To find the legendary golden cathedral at Pella, you turn off from the Grand Namaqua Highway (R14), drive for about 10km into scrub desert and look out for the date palm groves.

If you've come from Johannesburg, you've had to pass through the village of Pofadder in the Northern Cape province.

Although 'pofadder' is the Afrikaans word for the venomous puff adder, the town's name has little to do with snakes. It's named after a local Koranna chief called Klaas Pofadder, who died
here in a hail of bullets back in the 19^th century.

If you've arrived from the west in springtime, your head is still spinning with bright Namaqua daisies. But now you're in Bushmanland, where the amber quiver tree rules.

Pella Cathedral was completed by Father JM Simon, Father Leo Wolf and the brothers of the Order of St Francis de Sales (patron saint of writers) back in 1894. Constructed in Roman-Gothic style, the hardy priests used the Encyclopedie des Arts et Metiers as a handbook and built this marvellous place of prayer in only 7 years.

They made 500 trips to the Orange River - a couple of kilometres away - and back, hauling 400 bricks at a time. They used 350 bags of slaked lime and 200 cartloads of sand and 400 wagonloads of stones for the foundations.

This was one of the epic construction adventures of its time. The legend goes that Father Simon carved the large altar crucifix himself, using only his pocket knife, during a six-month period of solitude.

Before the time of Pella and its great desert cathedral, the place was called Cammas Fonteyn. San and Nama people made up the congregation, led by eager missionaries from a number of successive church organisations.

Today, Pella consists of an 8 000-strong community and boasts a delicious, high-quality date crop.