The Story
Sir Lowry’s Village is a very special place to many people. It is nestled at the bottom of Sir Lowry’s pass which crosses the Helderberg mountains and links the Cape Town, the Garden Route and Karoo.
Made up of mixed-race residents who are the descendants of Afrikaaners, farm labourers and the melting pot of Afrikaans Chinese, Malay and Indians who were bought in to work for the local wine farms and to help build the railway and roads.
Sir Lowry’s Pass is an important link between the coastal areas of the Western Cape and the inland plateau. The first recorded crossing of what was previously called the Hottentots Holland Kloof Pass was in 1664 (this pass is about 2 kilometres away from the current Sir Lowry’s Pass). By the 1800s, this pass was seeing 4500 ox-wagons crossing into the interior of South Africa. The evidence of these ox-wagons that remains on the pass were declared a National Monument in 1958.
In 1821 Sir Galbraith Lowry Cole, without permission from the British government but using its funds, started to build the pass to make it more accessible. This opened up the Karoo and the Eastern Cape to the voortrekker and traders, and a toll house was built to reimburse the British government. The pass was further developed further in the 1930s, the 1950s and finally to what we see today in 1984.
The village sprung up after the railway was first built in 1902 to carry weekenders from Cape Town to the Caledon warm baths. The visitors and traders would stay overnight at the old Inn.