Cape Floral Region

The Cape Floral Region Protected Areas form a serial property inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2004 and extended in 2015, bringing together several protected areas at the south-western tip of South Africa, among them Table Mountain, the Cederberg massif, Boland, Groot Winterhoek, Swartberg, Baviaanskloof and De Hoop.

The Cape Floral Region is one of the six floristic kingdoms of the planet and by some way the smallest: it occupies less than 0.5% of the surface of Africa and holds close to 20% of the continent's flora. It is home to some 9,000 plant species, of which around 70% exist nowhere else. The dominant formation is fynbos, a sclerophyllous scrub adapted to extremely poor soils, dry summers and recurrent fire, in which proteas, ericas and restios live together at species densities per hectare comparable to those of tropical rainforest.

Fire is the central ecological process: many species depend on it to germinate, and managing fire regimes is the principal conservation tool. The gravest threats are invasive plants — pines, wattles and eucalypts that consume the water and displace the fynbos — agricultural and urban expansion, and climate change, which reduces the available habitat in a territory where many species have tiny distributions. The fauna, less spectacular than the flora, includes numerous endemic invertebrates, reptiles and nectar-feeding birds coevolved with the proteas.