Self-Catering Accommodation in Great Brak River

Great Brak River — Groot Brak Rivier — is a village at a river mouth, midway between Mossel Bay and George, and it is the quietest place to stay on this stretch of the Garden Route. The estuary is the whole point: a broad tidal lagoon with an island suburb in the middle of it, linked to the mainland by a single-lane bridge, and holiday homes looking over the water from both banks.

The village exists because of one family. Charles Searle, an English paper-mill hand, emigrated to the Cape with his wife and four children in 1859, landing at Mossel Bay after a sixty-eight-day voyage; his elder brother Richard had arrived in 1850 to work for the Central Road Board. Charles took the tender to keep the toll bridge and made boots on the side. A boot factory went up in 1886 and a tannery the year after, and the Searles' shops, tannery, timber and shoe-making businesses became the village. The factory is still going — now Bolton Footwear — which makes Great Brak one of the few Garden Route villages that never became purely a holiday town.

Self-catering here is mostly free-standing holiday homes rather than apartment blocks, and a good share of it is on or near the water. The Island is the address people know, but the banks either side and the beach end at the river mouth all have stock. It is unhurried, well-suited to families with small children because of the sheltered lagoon, and noticeably cheaper than Mossel Bay's Point or anything east of George.

The village also happens to be the closest base to the game reserves inland — Botlierskop is about eleven kilometres inland to the west — so it works well if you want a safari morning and a lagoon afternoon in the same day, without the drive back to a bigger town.