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Within minutes of the city are literally hundreds of beautiful walking routes of any duration. If you look carefully you can see smoke rising from the Helderberg Mountain on the opposite side of the valley. This was the enormous fire that we experienced a few weeks ago.

The fact is that our remarkable biodiverse fynbos is dependant on fire for regeneration. Without fire our unique flower community would perish. However in this modern age we face contradictory forces. The plants need fire but the homes and businesses do not. Also the plants need to experience a burn at healthy intervals of several years. In this instance several homes, a hotel and businesses were damaged. The fynbos will recover over the following years, but if another fire burns in this area before the plants have produced seeds for the next generation, we could have localised extinctions of some species.