Hotazel 1 Traditional Cache

Hotazel was once a farm where surveyors looked around and said it was ‘As hot as hell’ out here. It then became a small village after strong reserves of manganese were found here and a mining company set up shop. Today it stands out as having one of the oddest names for a town in South Africa.The story goes that a team of land surveyors stayed in the area sometime in 1915 and deemed the place to be ‘hot as hell’. Apparently they staged a raucous party out in the dunes one night and dubbed the spot Hotazel.The farm that was established here took on the name of Hotazel, as did the little village that was registered at this location in the late 1950s.The reason for the founding of the town of Hotazel was that a water diviner looking to source an subterranean stream found manganese-bearing black rock underground here and a mining company then bought the farm.