There are all sorts of historical trails and wine trails across the world. Now De Beers has created the Diamond Route, a partnership between De Beers and the Oppenheimer family that links eight sites across northern South Africa in a tourism route. The route stretches from Namaqualand on the west coast, to Kimberley (Benfontein, Rooipoort and Dronfield), then north to Tswalu in the Kalahari, through Brenthurst Gardens in Johannesburg eastwards to Ezemvelo Nature Reserve and northwards to the Venetia Limpopo reserve in far Limpopo.  The route makes private conservation land owned by diamond-miner De Beers and the Oppenheimer family accessible to tourists. The route is supposed to offer  insight into South Africa’s cultural, historical, and diamond-mining features.

The Diamond Route website carries De Beers branding and wording on the “positive legacy of diamonds.” a phrase I find a little hard to swallow given the long history of human rights and environmental abuses. What’s particularly interesting is the part about how the “natural areas have been diligently managed over many decades” a phrase which appears right over a picture of a giant hole in the ground. No matter how pretty it looks now, it’s still a scar carved into the earth.

The Diamond Route includes Kimberley, home of the “big hole” as well as a mining museum and the old mining town. Part of the purpose of the Diamond Route is to showcase the “new” De Beers, the one that cares about nature and the future. The concept of the route began back in 2004 but it has taken the last few years to develop it and upgrade accommodations and trails and train guides.  The route also represents a fundamental shift in the way diamonds are marketed. They were once distanced from the places they came from except in the vaguest terms of being “exotic” or from a faraway land. Now in today’s global world, the purchaser is encouraged to visit the places diamonds are mined in the hopes of forging an emotional connection not just with the giver of the stone but with the place itself.