Oudtshoorn

Farms were granted in the Olifants River valley of the Klein Karoo in the eighteenth century, and the town was laid out in 1847 around a Dutch Reformed congregation, taking its name from an earlier Cape official, Baron Pieter van Rheede van Oudtshoorn. For its first decades it was an ordinary Karoo farming centre of lucerne, tobacco and sheep, cut off from the coast by the Outeniqua mountains and from the interior by the Swartberg.

Ostrich feathers changed that. Fashion in Europe and America created enormous demand for plumes, and the irrigated lucerne fields of the valley proved ideal for feeding the birds. A first boom from 1865 to 1870 was followed by a far larger one from 1900 until 1914, when Oudtshoorn feathers were among the Cape Colony's most valuable exports. Farmers and traders — many of them Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who became the district's buyers and shippers — built sandstone mansions that the town still calls feather palaces, along with churches, schools and a grand boys' high school of 1906.

The market collapsed at the outbreak of the First World War and never fully recovered; fortunes disappeared within months and many families left. Ostrich farming survived on a smaller scale, turning to meat and leather, and the opening of the Cango Caves to visitors and of Thomas Bain's Swartberg Pass in 1888 slowly gave the town a second economy in tourism. Apartheid-era removals resettled coloured and black residents in Bridgton and Bongolethu on the edges of town. A bird-flu outbreak in 2011 struck the ostrich industry hard, and the district has since balanced farming with the visitor trade.

Oudtshoorn is one of the strongholds of Afrikaans culture, and its calendar turns around the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees, the arts festival held in the town since the 1990s and now among the largest in the country. For a week in autumn theatre, cabaret, music, debate and visual art take over halls, schools, churches and a marquee village, and the audience comes from across South Africa.

The town's identity is built on the ostrich: on farm names, on menus, on the museum's displays and on the feather-palace architecture that survives from the boom. That story also carries the memory of the Lithuanian Jewish community whose traders ran the feather business — a synagogue and a museum section still record it — and of the farm workers whose labour underpinned the boom and who are largely absent from the grand houses' own account of themselves.

Everyday manners are those of a conservative country town: greetings before business, church on Sunday for many households, rugby on Saturday and long family braais. Karoo music, choirs and Afrikaans literature have a strong following, and the Klein Karoo's writers and artists have made the landscape — dry riverbeds, folded mountains, harsh light — a recurring subject in South African art.

About 60,000 people live in Oudtshoorn itself, and about 138,000 in the wider municipality that takes in the surrounding farms and the villages of De Rust and Dysselsdorp. Most residents speak Afrikaans at home, and the town's population is predominantly coloured, with white and black communities alongside. Bridgton and Bongolethu, laid out under apartheid, hold much of the population and sit apart from the older centre.

Agriculture still anchors the economy: ostriches for meat, leather and feathers, lucerne to feed them, plus vegetables, vines and sheep. Tourism is the second pillar, built on the caves, the show farms, the passes and the festival. There is also a large military presence, an army infantry school having been based in the town for decades, along with schools, a hospital and the district's shops and services.

Days start early to beat the summer heat and slow down in the afternoon. Water is the constant preoccupation: the Klein Karoo is semi-arid, droughts are long, and irrigation for lucerne and vines competes with town supply. Unemployment and low farm wages are the other steady concerns, and the national electricity cuts of recent years have added their own disruption to farms and businesses.

Ostrich is the local speciality and appears in every form: fillet and steaks, which are lean, dark and closer to beef than to poultry; carpaccio; smoked ostrich; ostrich neck stew; and a large fried or scrambled egg shared between several people. Ostrich biltong and droëwors, dried and spiced, sit beside the beef and game versions in every butchery.

Beyond the bird, the food is Karoo food. Lamb raised on the dry scrub of the interior is prized for the flavour the wild herbs give it, roasted or grilled over coals at a braai. Potjiekos, a slow stew cooked in a three-legged pot, and bredie, a mutton stew often made with tomato, are the traditional home dishes, and the Cape sweet repertoire of koeksisters, melktert and malva pudding finishes the meal. Dried fruit, figs and preserves come from the valley's orchards.

Drinks match the climate. The vineyards of the Klein Karoo around Calitzdorp and De Rust are known above all for fortified wines in the Portuguese style, as well as for white wine grown in hot, dry conditions, and witblits, a strong clear spirit distilled on farms, is a Karoo tradition. Rooibos tea and strong filter coffee are drunk all day, and mineral water comes from springs in the mountains.