Agulhas

Agulhas National Park was established in 1998 in the Western Cape and protects some 210 km² around Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point of the African continent and the official boundary between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The name comes from the Portuguese navigators, who noticed that there the compass needle pointed to true north with no magnetic deviation.

The landscape is a low, windswept coastal plain covered in lowland fynbos, one of the most threatened variants of this formation because it has largely been turned over to crops. The park also preserves wetlands, salt pans and seasonal lagoons, and a rocky coast of low platforms beaten by a notoriously dangerous sea: the Agulhas banks have been the scene of hundreds of shipwrecks, and the Cape Agulhas lighthouse, of 1849, is the second oldest still working in South Africa.

The wetlands draw flamingos and waterbirds, and the plain is home to the blue crane, South Africa's national bird. It is also one of the few places where the geometric tortoise survives, one of the most threatened in the world, restricted to the lowland fynbos of the Cape. Off the coast, southern right whales come in to calve between June and November. The park also protects the Waenhuiskrans fossil site, with Pleistocene animal tracks in the aeolianite.