Southern Province, Zambia — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Southern Province known for?

Mosi-oa-Tunya, shared with Zimbabwe, is the premier tourist attraction in all of Zambia, and it pulls visitors into a province otherwise known for its fields rather than its sights. The Southern Plateau does the other work, holding the largest area of commercial farmland of any Zambian province and producing most of the maize crop. Farmland and falling water, in one place.

Where is Southern Province?

The Southern Plateau is the fact that organises everything else. It sits at the centre of Southern Province and gives the province its shape: broad, open country that carries the largest area of commercial farmland found in any Zambian province, and carries it in fields rather than forest. Grain follows.

Most of Zambia's maize crop comes off this ground, which makes the plateau the agricultural centre of the country as well as the geographic centre of the province. The rest of the province falls away from that centre. Then there is the water.

Mosi-oa-Tunya marks the edge that Southern Province shares with Zimbabwe, and the falls are the one piece of the province's geography that draws travellers to look rather than to farm. The province lies south of the equator and inside the tropics, so its year answers to wet and dry stretches rather than to four temperate seasons, and the farming calendar follows that division. Southern Province is one of ten provinces in Zambia.

It is not a small one, and the run between the plateau's farm districts and Mosi-oa-Tunya is a journey in its own right rather than an afternoon's detour.

What is Southern Province like?

Maize is the thread. A province that produces most of Zambia's maize organises much of its year around planting and harvest, and Southern Province does that across the commercial farmland of the Southern Plateau. Work sets the calendar.

The scale of that farmland, the largest such area in any Zambian province, means agriculture here is the principal activity rather than a background one, and much of the province's standing inside Zambia rests on it. The other current runs the other way. Mosi-oa-Tunya brings people into the province from outside it, and a place that holds a country's premier attraction lives with visitors as a permanent feature rather than an occasional one.

The falls are shared with Zimbabwe, which makes the site a joint inheritance rather than a possession, and the name Mosi-oa-Tunya is the one the province uses for it. Outside Zambia, the province is known for the falls before it is known for anything it grows, and that gap between how it is seen and how it works is part of its character. Two economies, then.

One turns on the harvest of the plateau, the other on people arriving to see falling water, and the province carries both without either cancelling the other.

What is the history of Southern Province?

The record here is short on dates. Southern Province exists as one of ten provinces in the Zambian system, and the shape it carries is administrative before it is anything else. Mosi-oa-Tunya is older than any of that.

The falls predate the frontier that runs through them, and the sharing of the site between Zambia and Zimbabwe says more about where the line was drawn than about the water. What the province has instead of a long documented record is the plateau, whose commercial farmland is the largest block of its kind in Zambia.

What is the climate of Southern Province?

The Southern Plateau does the tempering. Raised ground takes some of the edge off the heat that a tropical position delivers, and the province's farm districts sit on that ground rather than anywhere else in Southern Province. Maize sets the test.

A crop that supplies most of Zambia's maize needs a wet season it can count on, and the plateau's is reliable enough that the country's largest area of commercial farmland has settled there. Being south of the equator, the province runs its seasons against the northern calendar.

How do you get to Southern Province?

Most arrivals aim at Mosi-oa-Tunya first, since the falls are what carries Southern Province's name beyond Zambia and the traffic reaching the province is weighted heavily toward them. Zimbabwe lies across the same falls. Reaching the plateau's farm districts is a different exercise, because the Southern Plateau spreads across the middle of the province and the run between its commercial farmland and the falls covers real ground.

Nothing in Southern Province is close together, and a plan that treats the falls and the maize country as a single afternoon will come apart.