Sandstone Buildings
Towns such as Ladybrand in the eastern Free State highlands have a reputation for fine old dressed-sandstone buildings. All empires rise and fall on the availability of resources.
In the Free State there are very few trees, but there's more than enough sandstone to go around.
The builders of the Orange Free State Republic therefore turned to that most bountiful resource to build their Voortrekker empire.
While we would not dissuade you from visiting Ladybrand, Clarens or Zastron, the provincial capital, Bloemfontein, should not be overlooked.
Stately old sandstone buildings like the Appeal Court, City Hall, National Museum and Raadsaal stand alongside modern masterpieces like the all-glass Civic Centre and Sand du Plessis Theatre.
Rose Cottage Cave
To members of the Order of St Augustine, Rose Cottage Cave in the eastern Free State is a place of worship and pilgrimage, a monastery having been built there by missionaries in the 1880s. To archaeologists, it is one of a number of cave sites in South Africa that contain evidence of Middle Stone Age habitation, dating back at least 100 000 years.
While places like Sterkfontein Caves in the Cradle of Humankind have yielded evidence of pre-humans going back about two million years, places like Rose Cottage, Border, Blombos and Klasies River caves reveal where and how we became the modern humans we are today. There is therefore strong support for having these caves declared a World Heritage Site, maybe with a name like 'the nursery of humankind'.