Some trips are about the journey, and the Garden Route is one of them. For about 300 kilometres, South Africa's southern coast strings together some of the country's most varied and beautiful landscapes: endless beaches, still-water lagoons separated from the sea by lines of dunes, dense forests of ancient trees, cliffs where the river plunges into the ocean and blue mountains in the background. All linked by the N2 highway, which runs its full length and makes it the great South African road trip.
The name 'Garden Route' comes from the lush vegetation that covers it, fed by a mild, rainy microclimate that keeps it green all year. But it's not just about gazing at nature: it's also a huge outdoor adventure playground. Here you'll find the Bloukrans Bridge, home to the world's highest commercial bungee jump; Tsitsikamma National Park, with its suspension bridges over the sea; the channels and lagoon of Knysna; and dozens of options for kayaking, hiking, whale and dolphin watching, and wildlife sanctuaries.
You travel it by car, at your own pace, stopping in towns that each have their own charm: Mossel Bay and its seafaring history, Wilderness wrapped in lagoons, laid-back Sedgefield, Knysna with its lagoon guarded by two sandstone cliffs, Plettenberg Bay and its stylish beaches. It's one of the most accessible and rewarding experiences in South Africa, ideal to combine with Cape Town and the winelands, and perfect for anyone who wants to discover the country from behind the wheel, with total freedom.
The Garden Route coast was Khoisan territory and an early point of contact with European navigators: Bartolomeu Dias landed at Mossel Bay in 1488. The area's forests (Knysna, Tsitsikamma) were exploited by loggers and gold prospectors in the 19th century. Today they are protected national parks. More on the regional history on the Cape Town history page and the pages for the towns along the route.
Read the full history ↓Wine valleys founded by Huguenots and worked by enslaved people, and a coast of forests, lagoons and whales stretching along the famous Garden Route.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before there was a road with a name, this green strip of the southern coast was the land of the Khoisan peoples: the Khoikhoi, who herded cattle, and the San, hunter-gatherers who had lived in the region for thousands of years. Plenty of water, forest, shellfish and game made this a generous coast. In caves and rock shelters in the area, such as those at nearby Klasies River, researchers have found some of the oldest evidence in the world of modern human behaviour, tens of thousands of years old. Many river and place names, like Tsitsikamma, Outeniqua and Keurbooms, still have roots in those original languages.
Europeans knew the Khoikhoi of the region as the 'Outeniqua', a name often read as 'those who carry honey'. They lived from their herds and from what the forest and the sea gave them, moving through a landscape of mountains, lagoons and ocean. When the first European ships arrived, this coast was one of the places where those peoples and the newcomers first met, and the meetings were often tense and violent. Like so many stories in South Africa, the modern history of the Garden Route begins with that encounter.
In 1488 the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias, the same man who would round the Cape of Good Hope, dropped anchor in the bay now called Mossel Bay, at the western end of the Garden Route. It was one of the first documented European landings in South Africa. The sailors came ashore to look for fresh water and ran into the local Khoikhoi, which led to both trading and fighting. A seafaring custom grew up beside a spring there. Sailors on the Portuguese India route began leaving letters in a shoe or a container hung from a large milkwood tree, so that ships going the other way could pick them up. That 'post office tree' still stands in Mossel Bay, and for centuries it served as a rough-and-ready mailbox for the ocean.
For the next two centuries, this coast was mostly a place where fleets bound for the East stopped to take on water, not somewhere people settled. Rugged ground, dense forest and a lack of safe natural harbours kept the region fairly isolated. Only in the 18th and 19th centuries, as first the Dutch colony and then the British one spread east, did towns start to appear and the resources of the interior start to be exploited.
The 19th century transformed the region. The huge indigenous forests of Knysna and Tsitsikamma, with trees like yellowwood (podocarpus) and stinkwood, drew woodcutters who felled trees that were centuries old to build ships, furniture and buildings in Cape Town. The logging was intense. It shrank the original forest drastically and almost wiped out the famous Knysna elephants, a population that became legendary for being so rare and so hard to spot in the thick bush. The figure of the poor forest woodcutter, isolated and hardened, became part of South African literature, especially through Dalene Matthee's novel 'Circles in a Forest'.
For a short time, gold joined the timber. In 1876 gold deposits were found at Millwood, near Knysna, and a small gold rush filled the forests with prospectors. It gave rise to a mining town that is now a ghost town overgrown with vegetation. The rush soon died out, but it left its mark. Meanwhile, daring roads were being cut through the mountains, among them the Outeniqua and Montagu passes, built by the legendary road engineer Thomas Bain. They linked the coast with the Karoo interior and made trade possible. Those passes, hacked out of the rock with picks and shovels, are still part of what makes the area so scenic today.
The name 'Garden Route' caught on in the 20th century. Better roads, and finally the modern N2 highway, made it possible to drive along a coast that had once been hard to travel. The nickname referred to the lush, almost garden-like vegetation that covers the region thanks to its mild climate and rain spread across the whole year, a striking contrast with the dry lands of the South African interior. Towns like George, Wilderness, Sedgefield, Knysna and Plettenberg Bay began attracting South African holidaymakers first, and later travellers from all over the world.
The Outeniqua Choo-Tjoe was a symbol of that era. For decades this historic steam train ran along the coast between George and Knysna, crossing bridges over lagoons, and it was one of the best-loved sights on the route until floods damaged the track in 2006. Tourism became the region's economic engine, built on a mix of beach, nature and adventure. Along with Cape Town and the Kruger, the Garden Route became one of the pillars of South Africa's tourism brand and the country's classic road trip.
The 21st century brought a change of outlook, from exploitation to conservation. The Garden Route National Park was created in 2009. It brought the protected areas of Tsitsikamma, Wilderness (the lakes section) and the Knysna forests under one management, joining indigenous forest, coastline, lagoons and fynbos in a single national park. The aim is to protect what is left of the old forests and an exceptional biodiversity, and to restore what centuries of logging damaged. The Knysna elephants dwindled to a handful that is almost a myth, and their story became a symbol of what was lost and of what people are now trying to protect.
Today the Garden Route lives from tourism that is aware of its natural heritage. It is a chain of parks, reserves and towns that offer everything from the world's highest bungee jump at Bloukrans to a quiet trail among the ferns in Wilderness, and from the oysters of the Knysna lagoon to whale watching in Plettenberg Bay. The region faces modern challenges. Wildfires are getting more severe, like the devastating Knysna fires of 2017, and development puts pressure on fragile ecosystems. Even so, it is still one of the most beautiful and accessible stretches of coast in the world. Driving it and stopping wherever you like is a way of reading that whole history in the landscape: the Khoisan, the navigators, the woodcutters and gold prospectors, and a country that learned, late but in time, to protect its garden.
