Historic Plettenberg Bay: Western Cape beauty on the Garden Route

PPlettenberg Bay, the ‘Riviera of South Africa’ and playground of the jet-set elite, has been called by many names over the years. 

Nobody knows what the Stone Age humans who lived here more than 100 000 years ago called it, or how later inhabitants – the ancestors of the indigenous Khoisan people – referred to their idyllic home, but in 1487, Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias dubbed it the ‘Bay of Lagoons’.  

In 1576, his countryman, Manuel da Mesquita Perestrello, called it ‘Bahia Formosa’ – Beautiful Bay. It was also called the Bay of Content, while in 1778 Governor Baron Joachim van Plettenberg of the Cape Colony took one look at this idyllic spot and promptly stuck his own name on it. 

A scant 4 years later the dandy traveller Francois le Vaillant came visiting, and in his records he calls it ‘Blettemberg Bay’. He also inadvertently renamed the nearby Keurbooms River ‘Queur Boom’. 

Call it what you like, Plettenberg Bay has apparently been South Africa’s most glamorous seaside spot for millennia, and nothing’s changed: every Christmas, it’s the place to see and be seen. Locals will tell you that at this time the ‘air is thick with helicopters’ carrying the rich and famous to the polo fields and resorts that dot the district. 

This part of the Garden Route in Western Cape province was first inhabited by Middle Stone Age people who lived in a series of caves along the coastline for more than 100 000 years. It still yields their tools, middens and ornaments – and those of the Khoisan who followed them. 

In 1630, a Portuguese merchant ship called the Sao Goncalo foundered in Plettenberg Bay, sinking and drowning around 400 of those on board. About 100 of the crew made it ashore and built a camp. They were the first long-term European residents of what is fondly known simply as ‘Plett’. They stayed for 9 months, building boats that would take them in small parties to India and eventually, back to Portugal. 

Dutch settlers moved into the Plettenberg Bay area early in the 1770s, which prompted Van Plettenberg to make a rather grand road trip from Cape Town across the wilderness to this marvellous bay. 

Farmers en route were instructed to prepare banquets, supplies and relief horses for the passing grandee. The party was led by explorer-soldier Captain Robert Gordon, and 2 months later the governor had a special memorial stone erected on a hill above the bay to mark the occasion – and the renaming. 

Van Plettenberg’s route was the same taken by Le Vaillant 4 years later, who at one stage found himself on the wrong end of a Knysna elephant, hurtling through thick forests to escape the enraged beast. 

His time at ‘Blettemberg Bay’ was marked with a rather rich supper of elephant trunk, and an equally astounding breakfast of elephant foot. He pronounced both to be delicious and proceeded on his jaunty way. 

Serious family dynasties have settled in Plettenberg Bay over the centuries, helping to set up an infrastructure that is, in fact, still a work in progress. Every year, the fleshpots of Plett surprise, delight and astound the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the beautiful bay.