Lying in a fertile, rich valley, surrounded by the Outeniqua Mountains, forests, rivers, and prosperous farmlands, George lies just 420 km from Cape Town and 320 km from Port Elizabeth, making it a perfect stopover from which to explore the Garden Route. Close to the highway, airport, shops and beaches. Regarded as the administrative capital of the Southern Cape, George is a rather big town with a sophisticated infrastructure. It has redressed its former image of an industrial town to that of a major tourist mecca - not hard to do when you have two of the top ten golf courses in South Africa, theatres, a wide expanse of forest, rivers and the Indian Ocean on your doorstep. If history is to be believed, then this beautiful part of the world was only explored in 1688, well after Dias had landed in Mossel Bay in 1488, in the hope of finding meat and fresh water. To the Khoi people, who lived in this rich valley, the region was known as Outeniqualand - the ‘land of milk and honey’ - which aptly describes this lush and green paradise. A settlement was established here in 1811 and named George Town after the reigning monarch of England at the time.