Cape Town South Africa is a bewildering mix of fabulously beautiful landscapes and vineyards which provide a resource for a booming tourist industry, within a few miles of vast stretches of shanty towns where people attracted by its stable economy come to seek well-being for themselves and their families.
The irony is that this ‘rainbow nation’ of many different languages, races and cultures did not start off as nation at all. Cape Town was only intended from the 16th to the 19th centuries to be a refuelling port for food and water for sailing ships of the merchant companies of Portugal, Holland, France and, finally, England en route to their trading empires in the East Indies and India.
Protestant wine makers
As a ‘refuelling’ station it needed to grow the vegetables and fruit which the ships needed. One thing the Dutch settlers found was that they could not make good wine from the grapevines which easily grew in the area.
