Golden jubilee for golden gate - a concise history of golden gate highlands national park, 1963 to 2013

Abstract

The Golden Gate Highlands National Park has been the nucleus of tourism for the Free State Province and for the South African National Parks in this province for the last fifty years. Sadly very little has been written on the history and the development of this Park since its inception in 1963. APJ van Rensburg, amongst others, wrote a striking article on the history of the area before 1963, but the heritage and culture of Golden Gate Highlands National Park between 1963 and 2013 has been left virtually unexplored by historians. Various fragments of its history have been research, but the bigger picture was left largely untold. This article, as a concise account of the Park’s past, attempted to, through qualitative research, form the basis of a research project exploring the different components which integrated to form the collective history of Golden Gate Highlands National Park since 1963. This initial research focussed primarily on limited primary and secondary sources and relied strongly on Park reports to fill the gaps caused through the loss of valuable historical documents in the veld fire that destroyed the Administration and Information Centre at Gladstone in 1987. Planned future research on historical subsections of the culture and heritage of the Park will be supplemented through interviews with influential individuals, the van Reenen family, local inhabitants and farmers, as well as documentation from various archives and private collections.