Coffee Bay, known as Koffiebaai in Afrikaans, is a small village situated on the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. It is located approximately 507 km south-west of Durban by road.
The nearest large town to Coffee Bay is Mthatha, which is approximately 94 km away by road.
Coffee Bay falls within the King Sabata Dalindyebo Local Municipality and the OR Tambo District Municipality. The area is filled with diverse wild flora and fauna.
The Mthatha River‘s mouth is near Coffee Bay.
The town was named after the hundreds of coffee trees that grew from beans either scattered by a shipwreck or by plunderers.
Coffee Bay is famous for the Hole in the Wall, a large hole that is scored neatly into a cliff that extends over the sea.
The community is largely rural, and Coffee Bay’s infrastructure includes informal settlements, a trading store, a plain camping site, and two resort hotels.
The traditional Xhosa lifestyle in Coffee Bay is one of the aspects that draws tourists to the area. At the same time, the Eastern Cape Department of Social Development identified challenges that include high unemployment rates, malnutrition, housing shortages, infrastructure backlogs, low levels of health facilities, low levels of education, HIV, and environmental degradation. The communities’ lives are dominated by poverty and ill-health, and most of the population does not comply with the environmental legislation regarding the use of natural resources.
A study has suggested that high illiteracy and unemployment compel people to use coastal natural resources to satisfy their basic needs.
History
Coffee Bay is located in an area that was previously part of the Xhosa bantustan of Transkei, and the population is still predominantly Xhosa.
One of the arguments is that the town was named Coffee Bay in 1893 after a shipwreck lost its cargo of coffee beans near the coast of Coffee Bay, although there may no longer be any coffee trees or beans in the Coffee Bay area.
