From Crayfish Factory to Wine Cellar
Although the town was only established in 1925 when the North Bay Canning Company built a crayfish-packing factory, the bay was used long before as an anchorage on the sea-trading route and provisions were transported by camels inland to Vanrhynsdorp.
To build the crayfish factory, Dutchman Koos Bleeker employed the help of locals, which included Jan Laubscher, from the Sandveld. The Laubscher family still farms in the area.
The once dilapidated crayfish factory now hosts a wine cellar and tasting locale for the Fryer’s Cove wines, named after Richard Fryer, one of Doringbaai’s earliest residents and first commercial farmer and founder of the first school in the nearby Strandfontein Village.
The crayfish factory closed down in the 1970s and is now used for abalone farming. It is also the site of a community-run restaurant and the Fryer’s Cove wine cellar and tasting venue. Grapes from this winery comes from one of the world's closest vineyards to the Atlantic Ocean, dotting the hillside only 820 m from the breakers.
A tiny fishing settlement in the southern part of Namaqualand, Doringbaai, or ‘Thornbay’ as it was called long ago, lies on the west coa...
Matzikama means ‘place of water’ and is originally a Khoisan name. The name is combined from the words ‘matzi’ - he gives - and ‘k...