{"id":187,"date":"2024-08-28T10:35:07","date_gmt":"2024-08-28T10:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lourensriver.co.za\/index.php\/blog\/"},"modified":"2026-02-28T11:21:50","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T11:21:50","slug":"blog","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/lourensriver.co.za\/index.php\/blog\/","title":{"rendered":"guest house flava – blog"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The story of the Lourens River<\/h2>\n

  
The Lourens River mouth is located at 34\u00b006'5 and 18\u00b049'E in\nthe northeast corner of False Bay, approximately 40 km southeast of Cape Town. It rises in the Hottentots Holland Mountains, flows through the town of\nSomerset West and enters the ocean at the northwest of Strand. 
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It is the\nfastest flowing shortest perennial river in South Africa and has a catchment\narea of 92 km\u00b2. 
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The river was known in the 17th century as the Tweederivier,\nas it was the second river crossed after the \"Eersterivier\" on the journey\nfrom the Cape Peninsula. It became the Lourens River, after corporal Lourens\nVisser drowned in it.
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 Historically, the Lourens River has been used as a source of\ndomestic and agricultural water since the late seventeenth century, when the first\nwhite settlers established a camp on the banks of the river. 
The Lourens River Bridge in Main Road was built in 1845 and\nis the second oldest surviving bridge in South Africa. 
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Through the ages the farmlands of the upper catchment have\nbeen subdivided and consolidated and at present the river rises almost entirely\nwithin the vast estates of Lourensford and Vergelegen. Lourensford being named\nbecause there is a shallow place in the river that allowed the ox wagons to\ncross it. The name Vergelegen came because it took three days by ox-wagon to\nreach Willem Adriaan's farm and the meaning is 'situated far away'. 
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The Lourens River falls under the jurisdiction of multiple\nauthorities and private land-owners. 
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The street our guest house is situated in is called Lourens\nStreet and it often gets mistaken for Lourensford Road; the road that leads\nfrom Main Road to Lourensford and Vergelegen wine estates. 
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The river does not\nrun directly through our property put makes a bend before the bridge in our\nstreet. 
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And just to make it more difficult, in 3 km distance from\nour guest house, there is a Lourens River Road in Strand our neighbouring town.  
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The story of the Lourens River   The Lourens River mouth is located at 34\u00b006’5 and 18\u00b049’E in the northeast corner of False Bay, approximately 40 km southeast of Cape Town. It rises in the Hottentots Holland Mountains, flows through the town of Somerset West and enters the ocean at the northwest of Strand.  It is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-187","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lourensriver.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lourensriver.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lourensriver.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lourensriver.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lourensriver.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lourensriver.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":305,"href":"https:\/\/lourensriver.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/187\/revisions\/305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lourensriver.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}