Rain and sunshine - and the sweep of Bantry Bay, one of Cape Town's affluent Atlantic suburbs. From 1803-1808 a botanical garden was established on the lower slopes of Lion's Head by Dr Friedrich Ludwig Liesching, a physician from Germany who practiced in Cape Town. (Funnily enough there seems to have been another botanic garden just around the corner in Tamboerskloof established by another German - the pharmacist Carl Ferdinand Heinrich von Ludwig - also known as Baron von Ludwig a little later in 1826 or so.) The bay was originally known as Botany Bay but by the 1920s the garden had vanished and it had morphed into Bantry Bay and no-one is really sure why. Two photos below, taken from roughly the same positions, show it sometime in the 1930s and in 1816. Ellerman House - a smart hotel today - can be seen in the new photo above (just below the crane in the centre) and in the old one below. 
The two photos and the information in this post are from the book The Lion Mountain by Mona De Beer.
And to think, its gone from a botanical garden to some of the most saught after properties in South Africa
ReplyDeleteTo me it is sad to replace natural beauty with wall to wall hotels. But I can see many other POVs - that's generally my trouble.
ReplyDeleteAhaa, its nice conversation regarding this article here at this website, I have read all
ReplyDeletethat, so at this time me also commenting here.
Feel free to visit my page; http://manyfriends.net/SolSchulz
Hello to every single one, it's genuinely a good for me to pay a visit this web page, it includes useful Information.
ReplyDeleteAlso visit my blog post :: http://sosyal.tekbilim.com/index.php?do=/profile-21785/info/