Google Business Profile management in Kimberley

Kimberley at a glance

Kimberley serves as the Northern Cape capital. It grew around diamonds, and the Big Hole, about 17 hectares in area and 463 metres wide, was dug by hand and mined to a depth of 1097 metres.

The city has firsts to its name. On 2 September 1882 it became the first town in the southern hemisphere to switch on electric street lights, and a stock exchange opened here in 1881.

De Beers began here, and mining history is still a big part of what visitors come to see. Tourists at the Big Hole look for lunch, coffee and somewhere to stay nearby.

Kimberley calls itself the City that Sparkles. Mokala National Park lies nearby, and its guests stock up in town.

As the provincial capital, Kimberley also has government offices and serves a large, sparsely populated region. People travel in from far away, so hours on Google must be exact.

Kimberley lies about 110 kilometres east of where the Vaal and Orange rivers meet. The town was besieged from 14 October 1899 to 15 February 1900 during the Second Boer War.

Cecil Rhodes and Charles Rudd combined smaller mining firms into De Beers, which merged with Barney Barnato's company in 1888 to form De Beers Consolidated Mines. By 1873 Kimberley was the second largest town in the country.

About 50,000 miners dug the Big Hole with picks and shovels between 1871 and 1914, yielding 2,722 kilograms of diamonds. It was placed on UNESCO's World Heritage Tentative List in 2004.

At the 2011 census the urban area, including Galeshewe and Roodepan, had 225,160 people. About 43.2 percent spoke Afrikaans and 35.8 percent Setswana, so replies in Afrikaans are often welcome.

Sports grounds include Griqua Park, the De Beers Diamond Oval and Galeshewe Stadium, and the Mittah Seperepere Convention Centre hosts events that bring delegates to the city.

In 1866 Erasmus Jacobs found a bright pebble near Hopetown that turned out to be a diamond. In 1871 Esau Damoense, cook for the Red Cap Party, found diamonds on Colesberg Kopje, the hill that became the Big Hole.

After apartheid ended, schools and suburbs once reserved by the Group Areas Act opened to everyone, and the city's townships grew on its northern and northeastern edges.

The McGregor Museum occupies the old Kimberley Sanatorium, completed in 1897, where Cecil Rhodes kept a suite of rooms during the siege of 1899 and 1900. Its displays draw school groups and heritage visitors who then look up cafes, guesthouses and guided tours nearby.

Trading notes for Kimberley

Conferences, school holidays and cricket at the Diamond Oval set the Kimberley calendar, with long distance travellers stopping on their way through.

Check the dates with our holiday hours tool.