Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape

　　The Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape covers 160,000 hectares in the striking mountainous desert of South Africa’s Northern Cape Province in the northwestern part of the country. It forms a cultural landscape that is owned and managed by communities. The heritage site preserves the semi-nomadic pastoralist lifestyle of the Nama people and illustrates a seasonal migration pattern that may have existed in Southern Africa for two thousand years.

　　This is the only area where the Nama still build portable rush-mat houses (haru oms). The heritage includes: seasonal migrations, grazing grounds, storage posts (bases used by herders for seasonal cattle and sheep grazing), as well as the Nama’s homes with reed sleeping mats — small hemispherical portable structures made of a wooden frame of interwoven hoops, covered with braided mats of local rushes. The pastoral poets who live here gather medicinal and other plants, and their oral traditions, passed down through generations, are tied to different places and landscape features.

　　Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape Must-visit reason: The most distinctive botanical landscape Continent: Africa [Africa] Country/Region: South Africa [South Africa] Province/State: Northern Cape Province [Northern Cape Province]