The capital and the only city of the province. Kimberley is in the centre of South Africa with two national roads leading to it, theN12 (Cape Town via the N1 to the south and Pretoria/Johannesburg to the north) and the N8 going east to west.
In 1866, Erasmus Jacobs found a small brilliant pebble on the banks of the Orange River, on the farm De Kalk leased from local Griquas, near Hopetown.The pebble was purchased from Jacobs by Schalk van Nierkerk, who later sold it, and turned out to be a 21.25 carat (4.25 g) diamond, known as the Eureka. Three years later van Nierkerk sold another diamond also found in the De Kalk vicinity, the Star of South Africa for £11,200. The second diamond was promptly resold in the London markets for £25,000.
As miners arrived in their thousands, the hill disappeared, and became known as the Big Hole. From mid-July 1871 to 1914, 50,000 miners dug the hole with picks and shovels, yielding 2,722 kg of diamonds. The Big Hole has a surface of 17 hectares (42 acres) and is 463 metres wide. It was excavated to a depth of 240 m, but then partially infilled with debris reducing its depth to about 215 m; since then it has accumulated water to a depth of 40 m leaving 175 m visible. Beneath the surface, the Kimberly Mine underneath the Big Hole was mined to a depth of 1097 metres.
Today, it is a prosperous, thriving metropolis with Victorian buildings that complement the more modern buildings of the CBD. Lacking the furious pace of South Africa’s larger urban giants, it is perhaps the country’s most innovative town. Home of our first flying school, our first stock exchange and the first city in the Southern Hemisphere to install electric street-lighting, it is mining a brilliant future from a glorious past.
