The Southern Region Heritage Trail is part of the Greater Gaborone Heritage Trail, which details almost all places of prime tourist interest in the Greater Gaborone area. Through this essential tourist package, the Botswana National Museum offers a completely fresh means of diversifying the tourism sector. For the very first time, a comprehensive visitor guide combines the best and otherwise well-known natural sites such as Mokolodi Nature Reserve and Manyelanong Game Reserve with cultural heritage sites to offer a limitless choice of fascinating tourism destinations found in the most southern parts of Botswana. A visit to these sites takes you through a panorama of Botswana's oldest geological formations to the awes of the rare stone plants of Pelotshetlha, ubiquitous and unimpeded folklores associated with hills and sacred gorges whose spirituality is unique to the southern region only.
Since the last two months leading to the coronation of the Bangwaketse Paramount Chief, historian and writer, Dr Jeff Ramsay has made sterling contributions in alerting us about import historical accounts of the Bangwaketse and other people living in the area where these heritage sites are found. This paper attempts to augment the invaluable historical information provided by Ramsay and offer some tangible evidence of some of the remains of the development of the settlement of the Southern Region. Although some of the sites have very little reference to some of the accounts of the Bangwaketse that Ramsay offers, they help showcase some of the fascinating sites within the broader area that he has been discussing. The map in figure 1 shows the location of 24 of the best natural and cultural sites of the Southern Region Heritage Trail. The heritage sites discussed in the map are represented by numbers located near villages closer to them. They cover a broader region that links some parts of the Kweneng, Southern and South East districts to offer a variety of heritage sites ranging from historic monuments, sacred gorges and hills, some popular game reserves, stone walled ruins and several monuments associated with the legendary Kgosi Bathoen II of Bangwaketse.
