Drakensberg (uKhahlamba)

The uKhahlamba-Drakensberg Park protects the South African sector of the great Drakensberg range, in KwaZulu-Natal, beside the border with Lesotho. It was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2000, and in 2013 the property was extended to take in Sehlabathebe National Park, in Lesotho, forming the Maloti-Drakensberg Park, transboundary between the two countries.

The landscape is defined by a spectacular escarpment: a basalt wall of more than a thousand metres of relief rising above the sandstone foothills, with amphitheatres, spires and ledges shaped by erosion. Above it stretches a high plateau with alpine grassland and peat bogs that act as a hydrological sponge and feed several of the main rivers of southern Africa. The flora is of notable richness, with a high degree of endemism in the high-altitude grasslands, and the fauna includes the bearded vulture and the southern bald ibis, both threatened and with important populations here.

It is a MIXED property, and its cultural component is of the first order: the rock shelters of the Drakensberg hold the largest and densest concentration of San rock art in sub-Saharan Africa, with tens of thousands of paintings made over at least four thousand years. They depict animals, human figures and scenes of shamanic trance, and constitute an irreplaceable source for understanding the cosmology and spiritual life of the San hunter-gatherers, whose presence in the range came to an end in the nineteenth century.