Boschendal

The estate's first owner, Jean le Long, was one of the party of 200 French Huguenot refugees who were fleeing religious persecution in Europe.

In 1812 Paul de Villiers and his wife, Anna Susanna Louw, completed a new house at Boschendal on the site of his father's home.

[1] Among the guests in the later years of the De Villiers era was the British Governor at the Cape, Sir George Grey, who stayed at Boschendal whenever he visited the region.

[2] A global phylloxera epidemic, caused by tiny, sap-sucking insects, spread through the Cape vineyards in the 1880s and 1890s, destroying the vines of the Boschendal area in 1890.

It caused much damage and led to a farming depression before resistant American vine stocks were introduced on a scale wide enough to stop the epidemic.

[1] In the meantime, farmers needed alternative forms of agriculture, and the lucrative fruit industry in California provided a suitable model for the Cape.

In the late 1960s the estate was taken over by the Anglo American Corporation, before being sold in 2003 to a consortium of international investors, led by the property developer Clive Venning.