Bloemfontein
The Judicial Capital And The City Where The African National Congress Was Founded In 1912, Which Most Visitors Do Not Know With The Anglo Boer War Museum Beside The Women'S Memorial To The Concentration Camp Dead, A Giant Mandela Statue On Naval Hill Above The Centre, And A Planetarium In The Old Observatory Where Boyden Tracked The Southern Sky · Bloemfontein, Free State
Bloemfontein is the judicial capital, the seat of the Supreme Court of Appeal, and the city where the African National Congress was founded in 1912 - which is a fact most visitors to South Africa do not know and which makes this flat Free State city considerably more important than its tourism suggests. It is also the Anglo-Boer War's institutional memory: the War Museum sits beside the Women's Memorial, which commemorates the twenty-six thousand or so who died in the British concentration camps, and the two together are the most serious treatment of that war anywhere. Above the centre, Naval Hill carries a six-metre Mandela statue, a nature reserve with game walking around inside the city limits, and the old Boyden observatory dome. Tolkien was born here. It is a working provincial capital with universities, rose gardens and almost no foreign visitors, sitting at the junction of the N1 and N8 where everybody passes through.
In the middle of the Free State at the junction of the N1 and N8, with Naval Hill above the city centre, Bloemfontein, Free State, South Africa
A city. The Anglo-Boer War Museum and the Women's Memorial keep daylight hours with a modest ticket and most museums close one day a week. Naval Hill is open daylight hours as a nature reserve with a road to the top, the Mandela statue and the Franklin reserve's game inside it; the planetarium in the old Boyden dome keeps separate show times. The National Museum, the Oliewenhuis art museum in its old residence and the Freshford House period museum each keep their own daylight hours. The rose gardens and the city parks are open ground. Load-shedding affects the city as it does the rest of the country. Bloemfontein sits at the N1 and N8 junction, four and a half hours from Johannesburg and about ten from Cape Town, with its own airport, and it is MALARIA-FREE and cold in winter.