Plettenberg Bay

The bay has been used for far longer than the town. Caves on the Robberg peninsula, Nelson Bay Cave among them, hold layers of shell, bone and stone tools left by people living off the shore and the fynbos over tens of thousands of years, and Khoekhoe herders grazed the coastal plain when the first European ships appeared. Portuguese navigators charted the bay in the sixteenth century and called it Bahia Formosa, the beautiful bay.

In 1630 the Portuguese ship São Gonçalo was wrecked here. About a hundred survivors were marooned for nine months and built two small boats from the wreckage, one of which met a passing vessel while the other reached Mozambique — the earliest sustained European presence on this coast. Dutch East India Company parties came for timber from the forests behind the bay in the eighteenth century, and in 1778 the Company's governor, Joachim van Plettenberg, visited and had a stone beacon erected claiming the district; his name replaced the Portuguese one.

A small settlement grew around timber, whaling and fishing in the nineteenth century, with a whaling station on Beacon Island that closed in 1916, and the town remained a remote outpost of the Knysna forest district for decades. The modern town is a creation of the road: once the coastal highway was pushed through, Plettenberg Bay became a holiday destination for inland South Africans, and from the 1970s onward hotels, holiday houses and retirement estates spread along the bay and up the slopes behind it. Growth has been rapid ever since, with the service settlements inland and the coastal suburbs developing along very different lines.

Plettenberg Bay's culture is that of a South African seaside resort, which means two towns in one. For much of the year it is a quiet coastal community of retirees, guesthouse owners, builders and farm workers; from mid-December to mid-January the population multiplies as families arrive from Gauteng and the Cape, and the beaches, restaurants and roads fill. The season ends and the town empties again almost overnight.

Afrikaans and English are the languages heard most in the centre, with isiXhosa widespread in the townships above the N2, and many households move between all three. Outdoor life shapes the social calendar: surfing and bodyboarding at the open beaches, fishing from ski-boats launched off Central Beach, paddling on the Keurbooms lagoon, trail running and long walks on the Robberg peninsula. Whale and dolphin watching from about July to December is both a tourist business and a local habit, with people stopping at the clifftop lookouts when the animals are close inshore.

The art and craft studios of the Crags, the farm stalls along the N2 and the small-scale food producers of the Bitou valley give the district a countryside-and-coast character distinct from the wine-farm culture further west. Manners are relaxed and informal, but the gap between the holiday-house suburbs and the working settlements inland is the defining social fact of the town, and local debate returns constantly to housing, water and jobs.

Plettenberg Bay is the main town of the Bitou local municipality, which counted around 50,000 residents at the 2011 census across the town, the Crags, Keurboomstrand, Kranshoek and the settlements of New Horizons, Kwanokuthula and Qolweni. The town itself counted about 32,000 people in the same census, and its permanent population is outnumbered several times over at the peak of the summer holidays.

The economy runs on tourism, construction and property, with farming, forestry and fishing behind them. Work is strongly seasonal: hospitality, building and gardening jobs multiply in the summer and thin out in winter, which keeps unemployment high and drives seasonal migration. Many households in the townships depend on grants and on wages earned in the holiday suburbs, and the contrast between the two is stark within a few kilometres.

Daily rhythms are early. Shops and offices open in the morning and close in the late afternoon; the beach fills before work and again at sunset; and the supermarkets, schools and clinics of the centre serve the whole district. Minibus taxis link the settlements to town along the N2. Persistent local issues are the cost and supply of housing, water security in dry years, the pressure of holiday traffic on a single main road, and the periodic electricity cuts that have affected the whole country.

Seafood leads. Line fish such as kob, yellowtail and red roman come off the ski-boats launched at Central Beach, calamari is caught along this coast and appears grilled or fried on almost every menu, and prawns, mussels and oysters fill out the seafood platters that are a Garden Route staple. Knysna, half an hour west, has farmed oysters in its lagoon, and they are served all along this shore.

Away from the sea the food is standard South African and done well: the braai, with boerewors sausage, lamb chops and sosaties over coals; potjiekos, a stew cooked slowly in a three-legged pot; biltong and droëwors, air-dried spiced meat, sold in butcheries in the centre. Karoo lamb from the dry interior is a fixture on steakhouse menus, and bobotie, the Cape dish of spiced minced meat under an egg custard, appears wherever cooking leans towards the Cape Malay tradition.

The countryside supplies the rest. Farm stalls along the N2 towards the Crags sell cheese, honey, preserves, berries and bread, and small producers in the Bitou valley make craft beer, cheese and chocolate. Wine comes mostly from the Cape, though a handful of vineyards have been planted in the cooler hills around the town. Rooibos, the caffeine-free red bush tea of the Cederberg, is the default hot drink alongside strong coffee.