page_title: Geography of South Africa
section_title: Central plateau
hierarchical_section_title: Geography of South Africa / Topographical divisions / Central plateau
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of the main regions of South Africa. The best known ones are colored in, the others are named as they would have been in an atlas. None of the regions has sharp clearly defined borders, except where a mountain range or the escarpment provides a clear boundary.
context_page_description: South Africa occupies the southern tip of Africa, its coastline stretching more than 2,850 kilometres from the desert border with Namibia on the Atlantic coast southwards around the tip of Africa and then northeast to the border with Mozambique on the Indian Ocean. The low-lying coastal zone is narrow for much of that distance, soon giving way to a mountainous escarpment that separates the coast from the high inland plateau. In some places, notably the province of KwaZulu-Natal in the east, a greater distance separates the coast from the escarpment. Although most of the country is classified as semi-arid, it has considerable variation in climate as well as topography. The total land area is 1,220,813 km². It has the 23rd largest Exclusive Economic Zone of 1,535,538 km².
  The South African central plateau contains only two major rivers: the Limpopo, and the Orange which runs with a variable flow across the central landscape from east to west, emptying into the Atlantic Ocean at the Namibian border.
  The eastern and southern coastal regions are drained by numerous shorter rivers. There are very few coastal rivers along the arid west coast north of 31°30′S.
context_section_description: The central plateau (apart from the Lesotho Highlands) forms a largely flat, tilted surface which, as indicated above, is highest in the east, sloping gently downwards to the west (at about 1,000 m above sea level). The downward slope to the south is less pronounced (the southern and south-western edges of the plateau are at about 1600 to 1900 m above sea level). The plateau also slopes downwards, northwards from about the 25° 30' S line of latitude, into a 150‑million-year-old failed rift valley which cuts into the central plateau and locally obliterates the Great Escarpment, forming what is today known as the Limpopo Lowveld at less than 500 m above sea level. The rivers which drain the plateau therefore run west, ultimately, via the Orange River, into the Atlantic Ocean. North of the Witwatersrand, where the land starts to slope down towards the north, the drainage is into the Limpopo River and from there into the Indian Ocean.
caption: Important geographical regions in South Africa. The thick line traces the course of the Great Escarpment which edges the central plateau. The eastern portion of this line, coloured red, is known as the Drakensberg. The Escarpment rises to its highest point, at over 3,000 m, where the Drakensberg forms the border between KwaZulu-Natal and Lesotho. None of the regions indicated on the map have sharp well-defined borders, except where the Escarpment, or a range of mountains forms a clear dividing line between two regions.
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