It covers an area of 17,800 square kilometers (6,900 sq mi) in South Africa's Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces.

It is part of a strip of moist coastal forests that extend along Africa's Indian Ocean coast from southern Somalia to South Africa.

The southern limit is at Cape St. Francis, east of Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape Province, where the KwaZulu-Cape forests transition to the Albany thickets.

The northern portion is generally receives more rainfall, typically in the summer months, while the southern portion receives most of its rainfall in the winter months, which is typical of the Mediterranean climate region to the west.

Rainfall diminishes away from the coast, and the coastal forest mosaic yields to the drier Maputaland-Pondoland bushland and thickets in the Drakensberg foothills, above 300 to 450 meters elevation.