De Kelders (or Die Kelders; Afrikaans: “the cellars”) is a coastal village in the Overberg District Municipality, Western Cape, South Africa. This is the place the Southern Right Whales call home! You don’t have to look for them. This is simply where they are between May and December. The whales you will see in abundance are the Southern Right Whales, so called as they were the “right” whales to hunt.
These whales travel to Walker Bay every year to mate, give birth and play until they depart to the ice-cold waters of Antartica for the rest of the year. The females arrive in May and quietly populate the bay and give birth, and the males arrive in July. This then gives arise to active sightings and flamboyant mating rituals.
With the South Easter the whales come lie right next to the cliffs leeward side and a sight to behold. Unofficially De Kelders is the real whale-watching capital of the world, Hermanus (across the bay) claims the Official title.
Ghosts and Legends of De Kelders
Klipgat Caves are an archaeological site that is relevant to human evolution. The site consists of two caves that contain human remains dating to the Middle Stone Age. The remains include isolated teeth, two manual phalanges, one pollical phalanx (of the thumb), and a mandible. The assemblage contains at least 10 (mostly) subadult individuals. The morphology of some of these bones are similar to other Middle Stone Age sites across Africa, including Klasies River Caves, Equus Caves, and Witkrans.
All along the coast from Gansbaai Harbour to Klipgat Caves are various freshwater springs coming from the Sandstone aquifers. Originally called Die Drup Kelder (Drip Cellar), due to a freshwater spring in cave, only one in Africa below the High-Water Mark. Recorded by Lady Ann Barnard in her travels around the Cape environs in 1797 – 1802, now called De Kelders.
It was the people of Khoi-descent that erected the first permanent settlement in the Gansbaai vicinity. In 1811 fishing cottages were built under the dense Milkwood Forests in Stanfords Bay at De Kelders.
The availability of Fresh water and bountiful seas – together with remoteness, rugged shoreline and multitude of caves there is also a lost legacy of an impromptu whaling station being made at the Drip Caves and a bit of piratical activity being launched. This is lost in the mists of time, the concrete pylons and random cemented chains only hint left.
One of the popular stories has it that local fishermen intentionally lured passing ships to the rocky coastline during stormy nights in order to loot the wrecks. The distressed captain, blissfully under the impression that the village folks were steering them to safety, would gratefully follow the light of a fire or a lantern beckoning them in the pitch darkness from a hill or dune, only to hit the dangerous reefs and rocks lurking just below the water surface. It is believed that this cruel practice carried on until the Danger Point Lighthouse finally put an end to it in 1895. However, there is no authentic proof or evidence of this practice, and it was never mentioned in any documentation regarding the Birkenhead disaster. The debut novel “Die Lanternswaaier” of local writer and storyteller SD Fourie is nevertheless based on this opportunistic practice that allegedly used to be a common and popular form of pirating by coastal dwellers around the world in earlier years.
[…] indigenous population of the Western Cape) in the Western Cape has been found in Klipgat Cave, at De Kelders. Until the first white settlers arrived at the end of the 18th century, the Khoi people thrived in […]