Cape Fold Belt

The Cape Fold Belt is a fold-and-thrust mountain belt about 1,300 kilometers long running along the western and southern coastlines of South Africa's Western Cape, with its visible mountain ranges spanning roughly 850 kilometers from the Cederberg, 200 kilometers north of Cape Town, east to Port Elizabeth. It formed during the Permian, between about 300 and 250 million years ago, when the Falkland Plateau collided with southern Africa and compressed the sedimentary sandstones and shales of the Cape Supergroup into folds and thrust faults; the erosion-resistant quartzitic sandstone of the Peninsula Formation holds up the belt's parallel mountain ridges, while softer mudstone floors the valleys between them, cut through by narrow gorges called poorts and kloofs. Its highest peak, Seweweekspoortpiek, reaches 2,325 meters, and its best-known ranges include Table Mountain, the Swartberg and the Cederberg. This entity documents the Cape Fold Belt specifically as a geological formation.