About
Port Elizabeth or The Bay (Xhosa: iBhayi; Afrikaans: Die Baai [di ˈbɑːi]) is one of the major cities in South Africa; it is situated in the Eastern Cape Province, 770 km (478 mi) east of Cape Town. The city, often shortened to PE and nicknamed "The Windy City", stretches for 16 kilometres (10 mi) along Algoa Bay, and is one of the major seaports in South Africa. Port Elizabeth is the southernmost large city on the African continent, just farther south than Cape Town. Port Elizabeth was founded as a town in 1820 to house British settlers as a way of strengthening the border region between the Cape Colony and the Xhosa. It now forms part of the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality, which has a population of over 1.3 million. == History == === Pre-Apartheid === Hunters and gatherers ancestral to the San first settled the area around what is now called Algoa Bay at least 10,000 years ago. Around 2,000 years ago, they were gradually displaced or assimilated by agriculturalist populations ancestral to the Xhosa people, who migrated into the region from the north.The first Europeans to visit the area sailed with the Portuguese explorers Bartholomeu Dias, who landed on St Croix Island in Algoa Bay in 1488, and Vasco da Gama, who noted the nearby Bird Island in 1497. For centuries, the area appeared on European navigation charts marked simply as "a landing place with fresh water".The Portuguese Crown had as one of its main goals in the Indian Ocean taking over the lucrative trade of Arab and Afro-Arabian merchants who plied routes between the East African coast and India. As they took over that trade, the Portuguese strengthened trading with Goa, their main trading point in India. The name Algoa means "to Goa", just as the port further north in present-day Mozambique, Delagoa means "from Goa" in Portuguese.The area became part of the Cape Colony. SOURCESWikipedia