Çkhari Karoo

The Little Karoo is a dry interior basin between the Swartberg and the mountain ranges of the southern Cape. Khoekhoe herders moved their flocks through this country before colonial farms were established, while San communities hunted and gathered in the surrounding landscape. In 1689 the Inqua chief Hykon invited the Cape authorities to open trade, prompting an expedition across the mountains. During the eighteenth century, settler stock farms spread into the Little Karoo and increasingly occupied its grazing land and water.