Gaborone, Botswana — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Gaborone known for?

Gaborone is the largest city in Botswana and the seat of its government, a place dating only from 1965 that has spread outward ever since into a low suburban sprawl of roughly 15 km across. The border with South Africa lies close by. Gaberones was the older spelling, kept in colonial-era maps and English texts long after the city itself took its shorter name.

Where is Gaborone?

The district covers about 169 square kilometres. Almost all of that ground is the city itself, since Gaborone is drawn as an urban unit rather than a stretch of open country, and its boundary follows the spread of streets instead of any range of hills. Southern Botswana is the setting.

The land here belongs to the interior of the subcontinent, well inland and firmly in the southern hemisphere, on the subtropical margin rather than deep in the tropics. Sprawl is the defining shape. The built-up area measures roughly 15 km from east to west, a low horizontal city that grew outward from its founding in 1965 rather than upward, and the newer suburban ground keeps extending past the older core.

South Africa lies close to the district on the far side of the international border, near enough that the frontier is part of daily geography for the capital. Nothing about the site is dramatic. Level ground, an inland position and a young street plan give Gaborone a geography measured in kilometres of suburb rather than in landmarks of relief.

What is Gaborone like?

Youth marks the place. A capital founded in 1965 has no long layering of quarters and guilds behind it, and Gaborone reads instead as a working administrative city whose institutions and street plan arrived together within living memory. Official business runs in English.

Gaberones, the older spelling, survives in colonial-era texts and maps, and the shift to the shorter form marks the same passage that made the town the seat of an independent Botswana. Order rather than spectacle is the city's reputation. Visitors and writers describe a clean and functioning capital, safe to move around and easy to read, which is a different proposition from a place that trades on monuments or an old quarter.

The suburbs carry much of the life. As the built-up area stretched to roughly 15 km from east to west, daily culture followed the households outward, so that the pattern of the capital is residential and dispersed rather than concentrated in one historic centre. Proximity to South Africa keeps traffic and exchange constant.

What is the history of Gaborone?

Gaborone dates from 1965, which makes it a very young capital by any measure, and the city was built to serve as the seat of Botswana rather than growing slowly from an older settlement on the same ground. The name changed as well. Gaberones was the colonial-era spelling, still met in older English texts and on maps drawn before the shorter form settled.

Everything since has been expansion, the streets pushing out from the founding core until the built-up area reached some 15 km from east to west.

What is the climate of Gaborone?

The interior sets the terms in Gaborone, far from any coast and on the subtropical edge rather than in the tropics proper, so the air is dry and the days swing further between warm and cool than they would nearer the sea. Seasons run in reverse. December falls in high summer in this half of the world, while the middle months of the year bring the cool spell to southern Botswana and to the border country toward South Africa.

How do you get to Gaborone?

Most arrivals reach Gaborone overland from South Africa, since the international border sits close to the capital and the road crossing is the ordinary way in for anyone travelling within the region. The city is the national hub. Onward routes to the rest of Botswana begin here, and getting about within the district means covering a built-up area that runs roughly 15 km from east to west.

Little of that distance is walkable.