Hout Bays past

Interesting Facts
Hout Bay
skip The first recorded inhabitants of the Hout Bay valley were the Khoisan.

The first European to visit & name an area was John Chapman, ship pilot of the Contest in 1607. He rowed ashore in the hope of finding provisions & named the bay Chapman's Chaunce (chance).

Jan van Riebeck in 1652 named it "t' Hout Baaitjen" (the Bay of Wood) due to the extensive forests in the area & it later became known as Hout Bay.

Timber from the forest was used for mast building & for the building of the Castle in Cape Town & shipped around the Mountain to Table Bay. It was because of this need that the Constantia Neck Road was built in 1666 to facilitate easier access.

But by 1679 there was very little left of the forests in Cape Town & Hout Bay so the cutting down of trees in Hout Bay was regulated & 15-16 years later, alien trees were planted. Many of these oak trees are still standing & most of the forested areas of Hout Bay are alien plantations, except for those in the Orangekloof Nature Reserve.

With the deforestation, land became available for farming & because of poor soil it was intially not very successful. Pigs & sweet potatoes were first grown here to feed the wood cutters & later sheep & cattle, but the wild animals proved a problem. Lion, leopard, elephant & other wild animals roamed the area.

Chapman's Peak
skip The bronze leopard on the rocks at Flora Bay, was sculptured and donated to the people of Hout Bay in 1963 by local sculptor, Ivan Mitford Barbeton, in memory of the many leopards that used to roam the woods of Hout Bay.

Chapman's Peak Drive was built by convict labor & took 7 years to build. Considered an impossible task, The Mountain consists of flat-lying succession of stratified sedimentary rock, belonging to the Table Mountain Group, resting on a gently sloping surface of a solid base composed of Cape Granite.

It was the French who built fortifications on the Eastern and Western sides to protect the Bay from the English in 1780. The ruins of the blockhouse and barracks at the East Fort can still be seen.

Manganese was mined on the slopes of the Constantiaberg between 1909 and 1911 & the old jetty at Flora Bay can still be seen.