Easy in the EC

Kenton-on-Sea is a holiday town between the Kariega and Bushmans rivers. It’s a place for walking barefoot and looking for hidden beaches, and where you might see a lion swimming across the river…

-  LUCILLE BOTHA

“Kenton? Oh, in Knysna? Don’t you mean Kempton Park?”

No, man! I’m talking about Kenton-on-Sea!

It’s a holiday spot about halfway between Gqeberha and East London, near Port Alfred on the R72.

“We don’t have many activities for tourists, but we have beautiful beaches, natural scenery and game reserves nearby with elephants, lions and rhino,” says Jo Wilmot, who grew up here. “We offer the best of the bush and the beach.”

Long before the Butt family, of Settler descent, built their farmhouse in Kenton in the late 1800s and people came with their ox wagons to outspan on the farm, the Khoi lived on the beaches and along the rivers, as evidenced by shell middens in the Dry Bones Valley between Middle Beach and the Bushmans River mouth.

All these years later and Kenton is still a small town, mostly because of its geography. It’s wedged into a 2,5km space between the Bushmans and Kariega rivers on the sides, and the Indian Ocean and R72 above and below.

After an early morning swim, you can head to The Bakery for a coffee and freshly baked ciabatta. In the afternoon, you can go to the Bushmans River mouth with your cooler bag to watch the sunset.

“Kenton is a laid-back place,” says another local, physiotherapist Margaret Morrell, who has lived in Kenton with her husband Dave, a retired anaesthesiologist, for 25 years. “We’re known as the ‘Barefoot Capital’. No one is pretentious, even though some of the residents were VIPs in their previous lives.”

Covid and Claudius

No one can say for sure how many people live or holiday in Kenton-on-Sea, but the general guess is around 5000. The town has shed its sleepy image over the last few years, with new restaurants and shops opening their doors.