Babylonstoren Farm Hotel

Babylonstoren is a working farm and hotel at the foot of the Simonsberg Mountain, outside Simondium in the Cape Winelands. The two-hundred-hectare estate is organised around a three-and-a-half-hectare fruit and vegetable garden that supplies the kitchens daily. Thirty-three rooms are spread across one- and two-bedroom cottages, suites, and a five-bedroom manor house that dates to 1777. The cottages have thick whitewashed Cape Dutch walls, fireplaces, and contemporary interiors — four-poster beds, underfloor heating, and a glass-walled kitchen cube added to the original structure.

Breakfast is included and built from whatever the garden is producing that morning: fresh-pressed juice, seasonal fruit, yoghurt, farm honey, and bread from the working bakery. Babel Restaurant, a converted cowshed with Cape Dutch gables and glass walls, serves lunch and dinner from a seasonal menu. The Old Bakery runs Italian-style evenings — pasta, wood-fired pizza, and a five-course carnivore menu on certain nights. The Greenhouse handles daytime tea and light meals.

Guests can join a guided garden tour each morning, cycle through the vineyards, row on the farm dam, fish in season, or take a water buffalo tour that ends with a tasting of the farm's own buffalo-milk products. The wine cellar — where fermentation vessels range from clay amphorae to concrete eggs to stainless steel — runs daily guided tours with tastings. The spa has a sauna, steam room, salt room, indoor heated vitality pool, and tropical rain showers. Seventy-eight bird species have been recorded on the farm. The estate also runs regular hands-on workshops in baking, blacksmithing, leathercraft, and gardening; hotel guests attend at no additional charge.