Upington

Province

Upington is a town in the municipality of Khara Hais, ZF Mgcawu district, in the province of Northern Cape in South Africa. 2011, it had 57,220 inhabitants. Upington is named after Thomas Upington, who was Prime Minister from 1884 to 1886 the Cape Colony.

Upington evolved from a mission station founded in 1873.

• 2.1 airport
• 2.2 Road traffic

Economy

Agriculture

Upington is situated on the edge of the Kalahari desert, thanks to the water from the Orange River but can wheat, vegetables and grapes are grown.

Tourism

Popular destinations include the Augrabies Falls located 120 km west of the 260 km to the north and Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park.

Upington is the gateway to the Kalahari, as tourists here again can provide you with sufficient supplies. While in Upington in the summertime often temperatures are reached over 40 degrees, the city offers by extensive green spaces a counterpoint to the Kalahari.

Worth seeing in Upington is especially the old, the Orange River located mission station in which the local museum Kalahari Oranje Museum is housed.

Traffic

Airport

The opened in 1968 under the name of Pierre van Ryneveld Airport Upington ( IATA code UTN ) served 1976-1996 as a refueling stop for the aircraft of the South African Airways on routes to and from Europe, as the airline on the African continent otherwise almost no overflight or landing rights had ..

In the year 2007 3694 airplanes landing and disembarking 19,961 were registered. One of the runways of the airport is 4900 meters, the longest runway of a civil airport in the southern hemisphere and therefore could even serve as a potential landing strip for the Space Shuttle.

Road

In Upington, the two highways intersect N10 and N14.

Sons and daughters of the town

• Alice Krige (born 1954 ), South African actress

Air table

The average annual rainfall is only 188 mm. The average minimum temperatures in summer are 17.8 ° C, in winter at 3.2 ° C; the maxima in summer at 34.6 ° C and in winter 20.6 ° C.