Patayamatebele and Old Tati give the North-East District two distinct historical points of interest. Patayamatebele is home to the ruins of Botswana’s first known mining town; the cemetery at Old Tati contains the graves of two pioneering Catholic missionaries. For travellers who consider cultural interests when choosing a destination, the district offers a journey from mining history to religiously rooted remembrance.
Patayamatebele and Botswana’s mining history
Patayamatebele is a settlement in the North-East District and is home to the ruins of Botswana’s first known mining town. This brings together two scales: the ruins belong to a specific place, while the historical designation as the first known mining town applies to Botswana as a whole. This provides a clear focus for your travel plans if you are particularly interested in historic mining sites. Patayamatebele is therefore a distinct point of interest for exploring local culture and history.
Old Tati: Missionary graves and heritage protection
Old Tati is also in the North-East District. The cemetery contains the graves of two pioneering Catholic missionaries. A 2017 description lists the Jesuit gravestones of Old Tati among Botswana’s historic monuments and describes them as legally protected. The statements about the cemetery and the gravestones should be distinguished: the graves are in the cemetery; the legal protection applies to the Jesuit gravestones. Describing the deceased as pioneering missionaries places the graves within a religious history, while the legal protection highlights the heritage significance of the stones.
Historical highlights to guide your choice of destination
For a culturally focused trip, the distinction is easy to use: Patayamatebele mainly appeals to those interested in mining history, while Old Tati appeals to those interested in missionary graves and heritage protection. If you are choosing the North-East District for a particular historical focus, you can weigh up which of these perspectives should play a greater role in your trip.
Botswana in a broader context
In the wider destination of Botswana, the Okavango Delta offers a different kind of landscape. It lies in north-western Botswana and is a large, gently sloping alluvial fan, also known as an inland delta. It is one of the few large inland deltas with no outlet to the sea; its water seeps into the desert sands of the Kalahari Basin. The World Heritage site covers most of the delta and more than two million hectares of largely undisturbed wetlands and seasonally flooded grasslands. Its natural habitats include rivers and lagoons with year-round and seasonal water, permanent swamps, seasonally and occasionally flooded grasslands, riparian forests, dry deciduous woodlands and island communities. The delta is home to significant populations of cheetahs, white and black rhinos, African wild dogs and lions. Highlights include game drives and speedboat trips.
Another cultural point of interest elsewhere in the country is the Tsodilo Hills in north-western Botswana, near the Namibian border. The massive quartzite rock formations lie between ancient sand dunes to the east and a dry fossil lakebed in the western Kalahari. Their shelters and caves contain rock paintings that appear to date from the Stone Age to the 19th century, although they have not been precisely dated. The Hambukushu and San communities revere Tsodilo’s waterholes and hills as a sacred cultural landscape.
Discover more destinations: Francistown, North-West District, Kgatleng District, North-West, Kgalagadi District, Southern, Kweneng District, Central District.
Return to the main travel overview: Botswana.
