Do you need to find out where a particular South African farm or farm portion is, exactly?
In South Africa the primary property cadastral unit is the "Farm". These farms have, over the years, been divided and then divided again into numbered "Portions". Prior to 1970, as was required in Roman-Dutch inheritance practices, freehold farms were often divided equally between heirs. Land surveyors had to find a way to divide up a farm fairly, which meant for, example, an equal sliver of mountain and tiny bit or river frontage, creating ludicrous "erf plaase" that could be very strange, often uneconomic, shapes.
Since 1970 Ministerial consent has been required to cut a farm or farm portion up, and consent is not often granted if the resulting farm portions would be uneconomic. Now the executor of an estate is more likely to auction a farm and divide the proceeds between the heirs.
If you need to find a farm, you can use our new Farm Search Map fuzzy search feature to find a farm or farm portion.
Note that sometimes a farm may be spelt differently - like Zwartwater for Swartwater or Riflespruit for Rifle Spruit. This is in part because of the switch from Dutch to Afrikaans spellings, or where South African English has adopted Afrikaans loan words but used them in an English way - words like spruit, vlei/vley or kop come to mind. There are also lots of arcane spellings used for vernacular language farm names, so experiment a bit.
To limit the search by province include the 2 letter abbreviation in the search - LP, MP, GP, ZN etc. You can search on farm name, part of the farm name or number or both name and number.
This map product has been launched in response the amount of internet traffic that seemed to arrive on the website after search for some variation of "farm search map" or "find a farm map."
You can find out more about the map here.
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