Kimberley - Big Hole (Kimberley Mine Museum)

Kimberley's main tourist attraction is the Kimberley Mine Museum, an open-air museum centered on the "Big Hole".

The Big Hole (the Kimberley Mine) is the world's largest man-made hole, with a depth of 800m/.5mi, a diameter of 470m/1,542ft and a circumference of 1.5km/.9mi. Between 1871 and 1914 22.6 million tons of earth and rock were excavated from the mine for a yield of 2,722kg/6,000lb of diamonds.

Visitors can look down from a viewing platform into the mine, now filled with water to 150m/500ft below ground level, and picture what it was like when thousands of men were working in the hole and hauling the rock up to the surface with cables. By 1889, when the workings had reached a depth of 400m/.25mi, opencast mining was no longer possible. Later the work was increasingly mechanized, the first winding tower being installed in 1892.

On the west side of the Big Hole is a museum village of almost 50 buildings (some original and some reproductions), representing Kimberley as it was at the time of the diamond rush. Some of the houses, furnished in the style of the time, can be entered. The first church built in Kimberley was the German Lutheran church of St Martin (1875). Kimberley's oldest house, however, dates only from 1877; it was built of prefabricated parts imported from Britain: a residence of extraordinary luxury at a time when everyone else was living in tents. The "Diggers' Rest" is a reconstruction of one of the 128 bars which the town boasted in its early days. Other houses, shops and workshops line a cobbled street. In the Mining Hall is a collection of photographs and documents from diamond rush days. Opposite it is the Diamond Hall, the exhibits in which include a 616 carat diamond, one of the largest uncut diamonds in the world, and the Eureka, the first diamond discovered in South Africa.