The De Kruis homestead is set at the centre of a beautiful 18,000 acre wilderness reserve. Four farms were knitted together to make up the present property. The farms were granted by deed at various times between 1880 and 1893 but were held on crown permits for at least a century before that, and it is believed that the older dwellings date to around the 1820s. Their construction is typical of the era: local stone supplemented by sun-dried brick above a stone base for the “smarter” rooms, with timber and reed roof construction and deep casement windows. In places, much older structures may be seen – stone animal enclosures, the occasional ruin of a very simple dwelling.

For generations, the land was used for commercial sheep farming, and you will see that some of the sheep farming infrastructure remains in place – windpumps, rough access roads high into the surrounding kloofs, camp fences, covered kraals, a shearing shed.

Gradually, farming activities were scaled back and restricted to the camps closest to the buildings at the centre of each of the four farms. Wild animals returned to the higher slopes and the deep kloofs, and although this is a dry country with sparse veld you can now expect to see occasional kudu, mountain reedbuck, duiker, aardvark, jackal, rooikat, scrub hare, bat-eared fox and mongoose – or at least the signs of their activity.

Today, the Succulent Karoo ecoregion is recognised as one of the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots – one of three in Southern Africa. It is notable for the world’s richest flora of succulent plants, and also has an extraordinary diversity of reptiles, invertebrates, beetles, insects and birds. De Kruis lies at the heart of the Succulent Karoo ecoregion, and this diversity is much in evidence here.