St Lucia

The lake and estuary have carried the name St Lucia since Portuguese navigators charted the coast — the mouth was renamed Santa Lucia on the feast of Saint Lucy in December 1575 — but the country around it was Zulu, and the lake and its surrounding forests were long used for fishing and hunting. The first colonial protection followed in 1895, when parts of St Lucia were proclaimed a game reserve, making it one of the oldest protected areas in Africa and the oldest formally protected estuary in the world.

The modern village grew slowly in the twentieth century as a fishing and holiday settlement at the estuary mouth, reached by a long road off the main coastal route. Commercial forestry, mostly plantations of pine and eucalyptus laid out from the 1950s, covered much of the dune country behind it; some 23,000 hectares have been cleared from the Eastern and Western Shores since the early 1990s and the land rehabilitated. The lake, with the turtle beaches and coral reefs of Maputaland, has been listed under the Ramsar Convention since 1971.

The protected areas around the lake were consolidated and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in December 1999, then named the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park and renamed iSimangaliso in November 2007. The village turned almost entirely to tourism. Engineers had cut the Mfolozi River off from the system in 1952, and the estuary mouth closed to the sea in June 2002 and stayed shut for four years and nine months, concentrating salt in the lake and killing fish and birdlife. The two systems were formally rejoined in 2012, and in January 2021 the mouth was opened to the sea again, an event closely followed by everyone who lives here.

St Lucia is a park village, and its culture is built around the bush. Guides, boat skippers, rangers and lodge staff make up much of the working population, and conversation turns on water levels, the state of the mouth, where the elephants have been seen and when the turtles began to come ashore. Most guides are Zulu and have grown up in the villages around the park, and guiding qualifications are a recognised career route in a district with few other jobs.

The surrounding countryside is deeply Zulu. Homesteads, cattle and traditional authorities govern life outside the village, and isiZulu, clan names and respect for elders shape everyday manners. Community trusts hold land claims inside the park, and a share of park revenue and employment goes to the neighbouring communities — an arrangement that is a continuing subject of local debate.

Visitors bring a second culture: South African families on school holidays, overland travellers on the route between Durban and the Kruger area, and birdwatchers and divers heading north to Sodwana Bay. The village is easy-going and small enough that everybody knows the operators by name. Evenings are quiet, partly by preference and partly because hippos own the streets after dark — a fact residents treat as ordinary and repeat to every new arrival.

A few thousand people live in the village, with larger communities in the settlements along the road inland. Almost every household depends on the wetland park in some way: guiding, boat operation, guesthouses, restaurants, cleaning and maintenance, park staff and the crafts sold at roadside stalls. Sugar cane and forestry provide work further inland, and Richards Bay's port and industries draw commuters from the wider district.

The season shapes the year. School holidays fill every bed and empty the supermarket shelves; the quiet weeks of late autumn and early spring are when maintenance is done and staff take leave. Off-season, the village is very quiet by early evening. Water, electricity and the condition of the road in are recurring local concerns, along with the health of the estuary itself.

Living beside big game is routine. Hippos graze gardens and verges at night, crocodiles are in the estuary, and monkeys raid kitchens; fences, gates and night-time lifts between guesthouses and restaurants are part of ordinary life. Malaria precautions are normal in summer. The conservation authority runs education and job schemes with the neighbouring communities, and the balance between park protection, land claims and local livelihoods is the standing political question of the district.

Fish and prawns dominate. Line fish from the coast, prawns and calamari cooked with garlic, lemon or peri-peri in the Mozambican style that runs down this shore, and fish and chips in the village restaurants are what most visitors eat. Angling is a long-standing pastime here, though fishing is regulated closely inside the park and prohibited in some sections.

Zulu food is the everyday cooking of the district: phuthu, the dry crumbly maize porridge, eaten with amasi, soured milk, or with a stew; amadumbe, the taro-like root grown along this coast, boiled or roasted; beans, pumpkin and wild greens known as imifino; and meat grilled over coals at shisa nyama stands, served with chakalaka relish. Umqombothi, the thick maize and sorghum beer, belongs to ceremonies rather than restaurants.

The subtropical north grows bananas, pineapples, mangoes, litchis and macadamias, sold from stalls along the N2, and sugar cane fields run for kilometres either side of the road; pieces of cut cane are sold to chew. Restaurant menus also carry the national standards — steak, boerewors, bobotie, biltong at the shop counter — and South African wines and local lagers are drunk on the verandas at sunset.