Champagne Castle Heritage

Your gaze at the almost apocalyptic view of this awesome mountain range can only be enhanced by the knowledge that you are situated in the heart of uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park, a World Heritage Site. This is a location that offers a unique combination of outstanding landscape – and one of the world’s greatest collections of rock art, boasting some 40 000 images.

The park holds the most concentrated group of rock paintings in Africa south of the Sahara, made by the San people over a period of 4 000 years. The San Rock Art paintings, of which there are about 60 sites, are masterpieces of human creative genius that bear testimony to the spiritual life and beliefs of the San / Bushman people who no longer live there.

There are 721 World Heritage Sites in the world. 551 of these are Cultural Sites, a further 144 are Natural Sites and only 23 are Mixed World Heritage Sites. The uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park, in which this hotel is situated, is one these. For the World Heritage Convention to ratify this 240 000 hectare park they accorded it the distinction of being a site of “outstanding universal value to humankind”.

Aside from its exceptional natural beauty, the uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park has been declared a “centre of endemism” where various species are found here and nowhere else in the world, such as endangered grassland birds and threatened grass species in the high alpine tundra regions.