How does a stay in this guide support the featured causes?

When you book accommodation from this guide through Spekboom, a portion of the booking commission is directed to the linked causes. You can also donate to them directly.

Which causes does the Northern Drakensberg guide feature?

This guide features Royal Drakensberg Education Trust, BirdLife South Africa.

How many places to stay are in the Northern Drakensberg guide?

This guide currently includes 7 places to stay. Nightly rates range from about R800 to R6,800.

The Mountains That Built a School | Spekboom

Insider Guide: Northern Drakensberg

The Mountains That Built a School

Amphitheatre lodges, berg air and the little school they keep running

The northern Drakensberg announces itself from an hour away. The Amphitheatre rises like a five kilometre wall of basalt, and somewhere up on its rim the Tugela River steps off the edge and falls, in stages, further than almost any river on earth. Down in the foothills the light is softer. Sandstone koppies, bracken slopes, cattle bells, and a handful of family lodges that have been putting people to sleep under this skyline for generations.

What most guests never see is what those lodges do between check-outs. Sungubala Eco Camp, The Cavern and Montusi Mountain Lodge all stand behind the Royal Drakensberg Education Trust, which gives rural children in these valleys a proper start, from infancy to age ten. Book any of them through Spekboom and part of your stay flows to the trust. The mountains are the reason you come. The school is the reason to come back.

A school with a mountain range behind it

The Royal Drakensberg Education Trust grew out of a simple problem: lodge staff and farm workers in the upper Tugela valley had nowhere good to send their small children. The lodges answered it themselves, building and sustaining early childhood education in the shadow of the berg. Classrooms here have the Amphitheatre for a backdrop, and the children who fill them are the sons and daughters of the people who will carry your bags and cook your breakfast.

That is the quiet deal of the northern berg. The same families have owned these lodges for decades, the same communities have staffed them, and the trust binds the two together. Your room rate is not charity. It is the local economy doing what it has always done here, just with the school included.

Stay with the lodges behind the trust

Every stay below is directly linked to the Royal Drakensberg Education Trust. Book, and a share of the booking supports the school.

From R6,800

lodge

Montusi Mountain Lodge

14720

Supports: Royal Drakensberg Education Trust

From R5,400

tented safari camp

Sasi Bush Lodge

146

Supports: BirdLife South Africa, Endangered Wildlife Trust, Royal Drakensberg Education Trust

Bring your binoculars

The Drakensberg is one of the great southern African birding escarpments. Bearded vultures drift along the high basalt, Cape vultures wheel off the buttresses, and the grasslands below hold specials like the Drakensberg rockjumper and Gurney's sugarbird that occur almost nowhere else. You do not need to be a lister to feel it. Sit on a lodge verandah at dusk and the valley sorts its birds by altitude in front of you.

Several stays in this region also stand behind BirdLife South Africa, so a birding weekend here can fund the people who protect the birds you came to see.