Why Save Robberg exists

Save Robberg is a citizen-run initiative. We are residents and visitors, scientists and runners, walkers and people who simply care about a stretch of coast. We have no political affiliation, no formal organisation, and nothing to gain from this site except a corridor that survives the next decade intact.

We believe the coastline between Robberg Peninsula and the Keurbooms estuary is irreplaceable. It is fynbos that exists nowhere else on Earth. It is the place where modern humans first developed cognitive and symbolic complexity. It is the threshold to Robberg Nature Reserve, a Provincial Heritage Site of national importance. It is the land beside a grave that is still walked to in pilgrimage.

There is important formal work already underway in this landscape. The Robberg Coastal Corridor Protected Environment is the statutory management authority for much of the area. The Eden to Addo Corridor Initiative has championed ecological connectivity across the southern Cape for over a decade. The Plett Environmental Forum, Nature's Valley Trust, CapeNature, South African National Parks, and other local organisations have worked tirelessly to protect the natural and cultural heritage of this coast. We acknowledge their work with respect. Save Robberg is independent of all of them, a citizens' voice that adds to, rather than replaces, the formal channels.

We are not against development. We are against the fragmentation of one of the most important wild edges on the South African coast. We are against two developers, working in parallel, proposing roughly 400 residential opportunities on land that has no municipal water and no municipal sewer. We are against the commodification of a deep human heritage, more than 160,000 years of life along this coast, into a private commercial complex.

The regulatory process gives citizens five minutes, once, to be counted. Use yours.