The Matobo Hills, granite, rock art and a grave on a hilltop

The Matobo Hills rise from the plains of south-western Zimbabwe, about half an hour's drive south of the city of Bulawayo. They are one of the most extraordinary landscapes in Africa. Over an immense span of time, the granite of the region has been weathered and eroded into smooth, rounded domes, called dwalas, and into great piles of boulders, many balanced improbably on top of one another, as if stacked by giants. Between them lie valleys of grassland, woodland and streams. The Ndebele people call the hills Amatobo, often translated as "bald heads", for the bare granite domes.

The hills have been a place of human life and spiritual importance for many thousands of years, and they are a World Heritage Site as a cultural landscape.

The rock art

The caves and rock shelters of the Matobo Hills hold one of the greatest concentrations of rock art in southern Africa. Thousands of paintings, made over thousands of years by the San hunter-gatherers who once lived here, cover the walls and ceilings of the shelters. They show people hunting, dancing and gathering, and animals such as giraffes, antelope, elephants and zebras, some of them painted with great skill and delicacy. Many are thought to have spiritual meaning, connected with rain-making and the trance dances of San healers. Caves such as Nswatugi and Pomongwe, with their galleries of paintings, are the best known and can be visited.

The hills are also sacred to the peoples who live around them today. They hold shrines associated with the high god Mwari, still visited to pray for rain. They are also the burial place of Mzilikazi, the founder of the Ndebele kingdom in the nineteenth century.

World's View

On the summit of one of the great granite domes, a place known locally as Malindidzimu, the hill of the spirits, lies the grave of Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes was the British businessman and politician whose British South Africa Company colonised the country, which was named Rhodesia after him. He loved the view from this hilltop and asked to be buried there. When he died in 1902, he was laid to rest in a grave cut into the granite, surrounded by huge boulders, with a view across the hills that he named World's View. Nearby is a memorial to a patrol of colonial soldiers killed in a war against the Ndebele.

The grave is controversial. The hilltop was a sacred place for the local people, and burying the man who had led the colonisation of their land on it was an act that many regard as a desecration. Since Zimbabwe's independence, there have been repeated calls for the grave to be removed. It remains, and the view itself, over a sea of granite domes stretching to the horizon, is astonishing.

Near the grave stands a large stone memorial to the Shangani Patrol, a group of British South Africa Company soldiers under Major Allan Wilson who were killed by the Ndebele in 1893, and whose remains were later moved here. Like the grave, it records one side of a history of conquest.

Bulawayo, the gateway to the hills, is Zimbabwe's second city. Its wide streets were laid out in the colonial period, said to be wide enough for a span of oxen to turn, and it keeps many buildings from the early twentieth century. Its Natural History Museum is one of the largest in Africa.

Rhinos and eagles

The national park in the hills protects both white and black rhinos, and tracking them on foot with an experienced ranger is one of the most memorable wildlife experiences in Zimbabwe. The hills are also home to leopards and to one of the densest populations of black eagles in the world, which nest on the granite cliffs and hunt the hyraxes that live among the boulders.

Explore Worldwide's Zimbabwe and Botswana Wildlife Safari, thirteen nights, includes the Matobo Hills and Bulawayo, along with Victoria Falls and Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, and in Botswana the Makgadikgadi and Ntwetwe pans, Moremi, Maun, Savuti, Chobe and Kasane.

For a shorter introduction to Zimbabwe and Botswana without the hills, Travelsphere's Livingstone's Africa: Victoria Falls, Botswana and Zimbabwe, eleven nights, includes Victoria Falls, Kasane and Hwange.

The dry season, from about May to October, is the best time to visit, with cool mornings and clear skies for the views.