Somerset West - Radio Helderberg, Parel Vallei, Somerset Mall (Paperback)

Chapters: Radio Helderberg, Parel Vallei, Somerset Mall. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 20. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Somerset West (Afrikaans Somerset-Wes) is a town with 30,232 inhabitants in the Western Cape province of South Africa. It is situated in the Helderberg area (formerly called Hottentots Holland), about 50 km (30 mi) east of Cape Town and 10 km from Strand. The town is overlooked by the imposing Helderberg (meaning "clear mountain"), a part of the Hottentots-Holland range of mountains. The vehicle registration code for Somerset West is CFM and the post code is 7130 for street addresses, and 7129 for post office boxes. The land was initially bought from local people and a cattle post was established here by Dutch soldiers in 1672. A town developed around the Lourens River (originally "Tweederivier") and the farm of Vergelegen (Dutch: "remotely situated"), an 18th century farmhouse built in the historic Cape Dutch style by Willem Adriaan van der Stel, governor of the Cape and son of Simon van der Stel, who gave his name to the nearby town of Stellenbosch. Willem Adriaan was later sent back to Holland after being charged with corruption and cruelty towards local Dutch farmers. The farm is now owned by a subsidiary of the large mining company Anglo American, who have restored the farmhouse to its original magnificence and continue to produce some of South Africa's best wines there. The farm is open to tourists. The town was named Somerset after an English governor of the Cape Colony during the 1800s, Lord Charles Henry Somerset, with the suffix 'West' being added after 1825 to differentiate it from Somerset East, another South African town in the Eastern Cape. In the 1830s, Sir Lowry's Pass, named after later governor Sir Lowry Cole, was constructed to link the ...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=263957