South Africa's geography

Land area

South Africa is a medium-sized country, with a total land area of 1 220 813 square kilometres, or roughly equivalent in size to Niger, Angola, Mali or Colombia.

It is one-eighth the size of the US, about a third the size of the European Union, twice the size of France and over three times the size of Germany. South Africa measures some 1 600km from north to south, and roughly the same from east to west.

Climate and topography

Although South Africa is classified as semi-arid, it has considerable variation in both climate and topography.

The great inland Karoo plateau, where rocky hills and mountains rise from sparsely populated scrub land, is extremely dry, and gets more so in the northwest towards the Kalahari desert. This is a region of temperature extremes, extremely hot in summer and icy in winter.

The eastern coastline, by contrast, is lush and well watered, a stranger to frost. The southern coast, part of which is known as the Garden Route, is rather less tropical but also green, as is the Cape of Good Hope - the latter especially in winter. This south-western corner of the country has a Mediterranean climate, with wet winters and hot, dry summers. Its most famous climatic characteristic is its wind, which blows intermittently virtually all year round, either from the southeast or northwest.

The eastern section of the Karoo does not extend as far north as the western part, giving way to the flat landscape of the Free State, which though still semi-arid gets a little more rain.

The Highveld region north of the Vaal River is better watered, with its high altitude producing milder weather, with less extreme subtropical heat. Johannesburg lies at 1 740 metres above sea level, with an annual rainfall of 760 millimetres. Winters on the highveld are cold, but snow is rare.

Further north and east is the Lowveld, a region that gets its name from the drop in altitude beyond the Highveld escarpment. Here temperatures rise, and the land turns to typical South African bushveld, the habitat of the country’s wildlife. The Tropic of Capricorn slices through the extreme north.

On the eastern escarpment are the high Drakensberg range of mountains, where it often snows in winter. But the coldest place in the country is the Northern Cape town of Sutherland, in the western Roggeveld Mountains, with midwinter temperatures as low as -15ºC (5ºF). The deep interior provides the hottest temperatures: in 1948 the mercury hit 51.7ºC (125ºF) in the Northern Cape Kalahari near Upington. 

Oceans and rivers

By far South Africa's biggest neighbor is the ocean - or two oceans, which meet at the southwestern corner. Its territory includes Marion and Prince Edward Islands, nearly 2 000km from Cape Town in the Atlantic Ocean.

The cold Benguela current sweeps up from the Antarctic along the Atlantic coast, laden with plankton and providing rich fishing grounds. The east coast has the north-to-south Mozambique/Alguhas current to thank for its warm waters. These two currents have a major effect on the country's climate, the ready evaporation of the eastern seas providing generous rainfall while the Benguela current retains its moisture to cause desert conditions in the west.

Several small rivers run into the sea along the coastline, but none are navigable and none provide useful natural harbors. The coastline itself, being fairly smooth, provides only one good natural harbor at Saldanha Bay north of Cape Town. A lack of fresh water prevented major development here. Nevertheless, busy harbors now exist at Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Durban and Richard's Bay.

There are only two major rivers: the Limpopo, a stretch of which is shared with Zimbabwe, and the Orange (with its tributary, the Vaal) which runs with a variable flow across the central landscape from east to west, emptying into the Atlantic Ocean at the Namibian border. In a dry country, so dams and irrigation are extremely important: the largest dam is the Gariep on the Orange River