Quthing is Lesotho's southern gateway and, above all, its palaeontology capital. Around the town are some of the country's most famous and accessible dinosaur footprints, prints more than 180 million years old pressed into the rock when this region was a muddy plain. For many travellers, this is where you can literally touch the Earth's distant past.
But Quthing has more than dinosaurs. A few kilometres away is the Masitise Cave House, an unusual house and church built in 1866 by a Swiss missionary inside a rock shelter that had once been home to San hunters. The area also has San rock art and the authentic feel of a town in the kingdom's deep south. The town is split in two: the upper part, Moyeni ('the place of the wind'), and the lower part by the river.
This guide covers what to see in and around Quthing, how to visit the footprints and the cave house, what it costs, and where to sleep and eat. It also explains how to use the town as a stop on a loop around southern Lesotho or as an entry point from South Africa's Eastern Cape. It's a destination for anyone curious about prehistory, missionary history and the less touristy side of Lesotho.
The full name of the upper town is Moyeni, 'the place of the wind'. Southern Lesotho was the land of San hunters, and their rock art and shelters survive in the area. Under one of these shelters a Swiss missionary built the Masitise Cave House in 1866. The dinosaur footprints nearby, more than 180 million years old, make Quthing one of the world's great fossil footprint sites. That story, from the dinosaurs to the San and the missionaries, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The south of ancient footprints: Quthing's dinosaur tracks, more than 180 million years old, a missionary's cave house and the quiet towns of the south-west.
Read the history of The south →They depart from Maseru, 123 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Quthing's oldest history is written in the rock, as dinosaur footprints. Between 180 and 230 million years ago, from the Late Triassic to the Early Jurassic, this part of southern Africa looked very different from today. It was a vast plain of lakes, rivers and mudflats with a warm climate, and many species of dinosaur walked across it. Their tracks were pressed into the mud, which hardened over the millennia into the sandstone that crops out around the town today.
Southern Lesotho, and Quthing in particular, is one of the world's great sites for ichnites (fossilised footprints). At Upper Moyeni, scientific studies have recorded dozens of tridactyl (three-toed) trackways left by theropod dinosaurs, with footprints between 15 and 51 centimetres long, as well as a fossilised vertebrate burrow. You can visit these footprints. They are among the most accessible in the country and sit protected under a small shelter on the edge of town.
There's a reason fossils are so plentiful here. The Elliot Formation and other rock layers in southern Lesotho and neighbouring South Africa hold one of the most complete records of life from that period anywhere in the southern hemisphere. For visitors, resting your eyes (or almost your hand) on the footprint of an animal that lived nearly 200 million years ago is a dizzying glimpse into the Earth's deep past.
Long after the dinosaurs, the first people to live in the Quthing area were the San (Bushmen), the hunter-gatherers who lived across southern Africa for tens of thousands of years. They were nomads who knew how to survive in the mountains and valleys, and they sheltered in the rock overhangs common in southern Lesotho. These were the same kind of sandstone caves that, millions of years earlier, had preserved the dinosaur footprints.
The San left their own mark in the form of rock art. They painted animals, hunters and ritual scenes on the walls of their shelters, part of the remarkable painting tradition that makes the Maloti-Drakensberg range one of the largest concentrations of rock art on the planet. Several of these panels survive around Quthing and Masitise. They are a record of a people who have now almost completely disappeared from this land.
In the 19th century, Sesotho-speaking peoples arrived and the Basotho nation took shape under King Moshoeshoe I. Under that pressure, and the pressure of settlers and hunters, the San were driven out, killed or absorbed. Their legacy still lives on in the rock art and in the memory of the landscape. One of their old homes, a large rock shelter near Masitise, would meet an unexpected fate just a few decades later.
The 19th century brought a force that changed Lesotho: Christian missionaries. King Moshoeshoe I invited them himself, looking for allies and modernisation in the face of threats from the Boers and the British. French Protestant missionaries from the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society arrived from 1833 onwards and set up stations across the kingdom. They gave Sesotho a written form and brought formal schooling, the printing press and a deep religious and cultural influence that lasts to this day.
In the south, near Masitise, the Swiss missionary David-Frédéric Ellenberger was behind one of the country's most curious stories. In 1866 he built his house and chapel inside a large rock shelter that had once been a San settlement. The result was the Masitise Cave House, a home quite literally built into the rock. Ellenberger was more than a missionary. He became a pioneer of Basotho history, collecting oral traditions and writing key works on the past of the Sotho people.
The Cave House survives today as a small museum, a satellite of the Morija Museum and Archives. It perfectly sums up the layers of history that define Quthing: rock bearing dinosaur footprints nearly 200 million years old, a shelter lived in by the San for thousands of years, and a 19th-century missionary's house. Few places pack so much history (geological, prehistoric and colonial) into a single spot.
The town of Quthing itself is fairly young. It grew up as the administrative and trading centre of Lesotho's far south and is the capital of the district of the same name. Its upper part is called Moyeni, Sesotho for 'the place of the wind'. It sits high above the valley of the Orange River (Senqu), the longest river in southern Africa, which rises in the kingdom's mountains and passes through here on its long journey to the Atlantic.
Quthing lies next to the South African border and the Telle Bridge post, which connects it with the Eastern Cape. That makes it one of Lesotho's southern gateways and a stop for anyone entering or leaving the kingdom that way. Like the rest of the country, its recent history has been shaped by poverty, by dependence on money sent home by miners working in South Africa, and by the isolation of a rural, mountainous region.
Today, for travellers, Quthing is above all the palaeontological capital of the south and a place full of historical curiosities. It has accessible dinosaur footprints, the unusual Cave House, San rock art and the genuine feel of a town in rural Lesotho. Time here is measured on very different scales, from the millions of years of the dinosaurs to the centuries of the San and the decades of the missionaries, and the distant past is literally within arm's reach.
