The Highveld (Afrikaans Hoëveld, “high field”) is the part of South Africa’s interior plateau that lies between about 1,500 m and 2,100 m above sea level. It covers almost all of Gauteng and the Free State and large parts of Mpumalanga and North West, with smaller sections in the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape and Limpopo. In total that is nearly 400,000 km², roughly 30% of the country. It is a landscape of rolling grassland with summer thunderstorms and winter frost. Beneath it lies the Witwatersrand gold reef, found in 1886, which led to the founding of Johannesburg at 1,753 m. The Highveld’s coalfields feed some of the country’s largest power stations, and the Vaal River supplies its water.
Where the Highveld Begins and Ends: Escarpment, Magaliesberg and Karoo
The plateau has clear edges on two sides. In the northeast its highest rim, at about 2,100 m, is the Mpumalanga Drakensberg escarpment. Beyond it the land drops steeply to the Lowveld and the Kruger National Park. In the north, the Magaliesberg ridge divides the Highveld from the warmer Bushveld. To the southeast, the Great Escarpment continues as the Drakensberg proper, rising above 3,000 m on the border between KwaZulu-Natal and Lesotho. Those mountains are not usually counted as Highveld, so the boundary is drawn at about 2,000 m, just inside the Free State–Lesotho border. The mountain wall itself is covered in our guide to the Drakensberg plateau.
From that eastern rim the plateau slopes gently down to the west and south. It gives way to the Great Karoo in the south and to the Kalahari in the west, and Kimberley lies on that western margin. The surface has no real mountains. It consists mostly of plains, flattest in the Free State, broken by rocky ridges such as the Witwatersrand and the Magaliesberg. The Vredefort Dome, southwest of Johannesburg, is also on the plateau. It is the eroded centre of an impact structure formed by an asteroid strike about 2.023 billion years ago, one of the oldest and largest known on Earth, and it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005.
Hyparrhenia Grasslands, Blue Cranes and Botha’s Lark
The Highveld’s natural cover is grassland, not savanna. The main grasses are thatching grass (Hyparrhenia hirta) and Sporobolus pyramidalis, mixed with many herbs. Trees and shrubs never took hold because of frequent dry-season fires and heavy grazing, first by wild herds and now by cattle and sheep. The peaty soil under the grass filters water, so the remaining grassland also protects water supplies.
The grassland has its own wildlife. South Africa’s national bird, the blue crane, lives here. The only endemic bird is Botha’s lark, and the only endemic mammals are the Free State pygmy mouse and the rough-haired golden mole. The sungazer, or giant girdled lizard, is one of its reptiles.
Very little of this habitat is left in its natural state. Most of the Highveld is good farmland and has been ploughed for maize, wheat, sorghum and sunflowers or fenced for beef cattle. What survives is mainly in reserves, which are still the largest areas of natural grassland in South Africa. The best known is Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve, 134 km² of rocky Highveld grassland about 50 km southeast of Johannesburg near Heidelberg. It rises from 1,545 m to 1,917 m. Smaller reserves surround the Vaal, Bronkhorstspruit, Nooitgedacht and Koppies dams, and Verloren Valei, a Ramsar wetland near Dullstroom, is one of the few places in the country where all three of South Africa’s crane species breed.
Afternoon Storms from November to January, Frost in June
The Highveld has a summer-rainfall climate. From November to January, hot mornings often build into towering clouds and short, violent afternoon thunderstorms, frequently with hail and lightning, followed by cool evenings. Winter, from May to September, is dry and very sunny, with clear days and cold nights. Johannesburg’s winter nights average about 4 °C in June and July, and frost is common across the open plateau.
Snow is rare, but it does fall. Johannesburg recorded snow in May 1956, August 1962, June 1964 and September 1981. On 27 June 2007 up to 10 cm settled in parts of the city. The altitude also keeps summer heat in check: Johannesburg’s average January maximum is only about 26 °C.
Almost all of the year’s 720 mm falls between October and March, and July is almost completely dry. The pattern holds across the plateau and explains both the summer maize harvest and the late-winter grass fires. The country-wide picture is set out in our climate of South Africa guide.
The Witwatersrand Reef and the 1886 Langlaagte Discovery
The Witwatersrand, “ridge of white waters” in Afrikaans, is a 56 km north-facing scarp of hard quartzite. It runs from Bedfordview in the east through Johannesburg and Roodepoort to Krugersdorp in the west. It is the top of a ridge 7–10 km wide that stands about 200 m above the surrounding plains, at 1,700–1,800 m. It is also a continental divide. Water draining north reaches the Indian Ocean through the Crocodile and Limpopo rivers, while water draining south runs through the Vaal and Orange to the Atlantic.
Gold had been found in the area before, in 1852 at Pardekraal near Krugersdorp and in 1853 along the Jukskei River, but the Boer government kept those finds quiet. In June 1884 Jan Gerrit Bantjes found a reef on the farm Vogelstruisfontein, and the Struben brothers struck the Confidence Reef near Roodepoort that September. The find that started the rush came in 1886 (sources give February or July), when George Harrison found the Main Reef outcrop on the farm Langlaagte, 5 km west of the future city, and he is believed to have sold his claim for less than £10. The diggings were declared open, and the name Johannesburg was first used on 3 October 1886. Within ten years the town had more than 100,000 people.
About half of all the gold ever mined in the world has come from the Highveld since 1880. The largest deposits lie along the Witwatersrand around Johannesburg, with smaller ones in the northern Free State near Welkom and Virginia. The reef also gave the national currency its name: the rand was introduced in 1961.
Coal, Kendal and Kusile: The Mpumalanga Power Belt
East of Johannesburg, the Mpumalanga Highveld rests on coal. Witbank, founded in 1890, began to grow once the railway from Pretoria arrived in 1894. In 2006 it was officially renamed eMalahleni, “the place of coal”. Around it, Eskom built some of Africa’s largest coal-fired power stations. Kendal was built between 1982 and 1993, and when completed it was the largest indirect dry-cooled power station in the world. Its cooling system uses a fraction of the water a conventional station needs. Kusile, 15 km to the north, has six 800 MW units, 4,800 MW in all. The sixth unit was connected to the grid on 23 March 2025, and the station’s final cost came to about R233 billion.
Coal is also turned into liquid fuel here. Secunda, laid out from 1974, takes its name from Sasol’s second synthetic-fuel plant, after the first at Sasolburg, about 140 km to the west. In 2024 coal still produced roughly 80% of South Africa’s electricity, and the plateau pays for it in air quality: pollution on the Highveld is very high, mainly nitrogen oxides and sulphur dioxide from the coal-fired power stations.
The Vaal River, Vaal Dam and Water from Lesotho
The Vaal River rises near Breyten in Mpumalanga and flows 1,458 km west to join the Orange southwest of Kimberley. It is the Orange’s largest tributary and the longest river entirely within South Africa. Its name, Dutch for “drab”, translates a Khoekhoe name that also refers to its silty colour. The river divides the Free State from Gauteng, North West and Mpumalanga, and it gave the old Transvaal (“beyond the Vaal”) its name.
Gold made the Vaal the Witwatersrand’s main water source. The Vaal Dam, finished in 1938 and raised in the 1950s and again in 1985, now holds about 2.6 billion m³ behind a 63.4 m wall. Its lake covers about 320 km² and has more than 800 km of shoreline. In February 1996 it absorbed the largest flood ever recorded there, peaking at 118.5% of full supply on 19 February. To add to its supply, since 1998 water from the Katse Dam in the Lesotho Highlands has been sent through 45 km and 37 km tunnels into the Vaal system. The route of that water is part of our Lesotho country guide.
Johannesburg, Pretoria, Bloemfontein: Cities on the Plateau
Many of South Africa’s largest urban areas are on the Highveld: Johannesburg, Pretoria, Bloemfontein, Vereeniging, Welkom, Carletonville and the towns of the East and West Rand. Gauteng, the smallest province at only 1.5% of the land, had 15,099,422 people at the 2022 census, 24.3% of the national total. The City of Johannesburg municipality alone had 4,803,262 people. The city grew straight out of the mining camps of 1886. Its old business district sits on the southern side of the Witwatersrand ridge, and its northern suburbs drain to the Jukskei River and the Limpopo.
So the Highveld holds open grassland with blue cranes and frost, the world’s greatest goldfield, and a belt of coal and power stations along its eastern side. All of it depends on rain that falls mostly in the summer thunderstorm months.