The Cederberg is a rugged sandstone mountain range in South Africa's Western Cape, about 200 km north of Cape Town. It has a Mediterranean climate - rainy winters and hot, dry summers when temperatures climb above 40 °C. Deep, coarse, acidic sandy fynbos soils, clean mountain air and large temperature swings make the Cederberg the only place on Earth where the Aspalathus linearis (rooibos) bush truly thrives - the finest harvest comes from higher ground.
The story of this plant here is centuries old. The indigenous Khoi and San gathered it in these mountains for roughly 300 years, climbing the slopes to cut the fine, needle-like branches. In 1772 the region and its plant were documented by the Swedish botanist Carl Thunberg.
Commercial cultivation began in 1904, when the Russian immigrant Benjamin Ginsberg - called the father of commercial rooibos - started trading rooibos as “Mountain Tea”. The real breakthrough came in the 1930s from the Clanwilliam physician and botanist Dr Pieter Le Fras Nortier, who discovered that the hard seeds only needed to be scarified to germinate - laying the foundation of the region's cultivated industry.
In 2019 the first agreement of its kind was signed to share benefits with the San and Khoi peoples for their traditional knowledge of the plant; in 2021 Cederberg rooibos received the EU Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) - the first African product ever to do so. Only the harvest from designated areas of the Western and Northern Cape may carry the protected name.
