Where to Stay in Upington, Northern Cape

What is Upington known for?

Upington sits on its banks in the Northern Cape, the biggest town in that province after Kimberley, and the usual starting point for a run out to the Augrabies Falls. Donkeys earned a statue here. The Kalahari Orange Museum keeps a donkey statue, raised for the animal whose work carried the region through its pioneering days in the 19th century, and the museum occupies the old mission station itself.

What are the main landmarks in Upington?

Two landmarks carry the town. The Co-Cathedral of St Augustine stands among Upington's streets, and the Kalahari Orange Museum holds the old mission station that Reverend Christiaan Schröder established in 1871 on the bank of the Orange River. A donkey stands outside it.

The donkey statue there marks what the animal contributed to the region through the pioneering days of the 19th century, and the Augrabies Falls, the other draw people reach from Upington, lie out beyond the town.

What is the history of Upington?

A mission came first. Reverend Christiaan Schröder established a station on the banks of the Orange River in 1871, and the settlement that grew around it took the name Olyvenhoutsdrift from the olive wood trees that were abundant in the area. The town followed in 1873.

That founding date is the one Upington counts from, two years after the mission, and it marks the point at which the ground beside the Orange River became a town in its own right. Olyvenhoutsdrift did not last. Sir Thomas Upington, Attorney-General and then Prime Minister of the Cape, gave the town the name it carries, in place of the older reference to the olive wood trees.

Donkeys did the hauling. The pioneering days of the 19th century leaned on the animal so heavily that a statue in Upington records the contribution, and it stands at the Kalahari Orange Museum rather than in a square. The mission station houses that museum.

Schröder's building outlived its first purpose and holds the collection instead, which keeps the town's origin and its founding decade under one roof on the bank of the Orange River in the Northern Cape. Kimberley remained the larger town of the province, and Upington settled into the role of the second, a stop on the Orange River and the practical base for reaching the Augrabies Falls.

Where is Upington?

The Orange River runs through it. Upington lies on the banks of that river in the Northern Cape, on ground that runs to something over 580 square kilometres and falls in the subtropical band of the southern hemisphere. Olive wood trees grew here in quantity.

Their abundance gave the settlement its first name, Olyvenhoutsdrift, and the water that supported them is the same Orange River the town still sits beside within the province of the Northern Cape.

What is the climate of Upington?

Seasons here run southern. Upington falls in the southern hemisphere, so the warm half of its year sits opposite a northern calendar and the coolest stretch arrives when Europe is at its hottest. The subtropical band sets the frame.

Upington lies inside it, well back from any coast, and the Orange River is the reason a mission and then a town took hold on this stretch of the Northern Cape at all.

How do you get to Upington?

Upington is a staging post. The town's usefulness to a traveller is as the starting point for the Augrabies Falls, and it is the biggest place in the Northern Cape after Kimberley, which puts services here that smaller stops along the way do not carry. The Orange River marks the town.

Anyone approaching will meet that water before the streets, since Upington was laid out on its banks in 1873 and has never moved off them, and the Kalahari Orange Museum sits on the same bank as the original mission.