Gauteng Weddings

By The Celebration Team 23 Feb, 2010

The place of gold, Gauteng is not just the economic powerhouse of the country, despite being the smallest province, but it also boasts some of the best weather. There is an energy to Gauteng that extends beyond the fast walking, fast talking buzz of Johannesburg to the shimmering heat of highveld summers with intermittent thunderstorms that seem only to add to the vigour of the season and the countryside, and beyond into effortless winters, where the sun continues to shine despite the cold.

Gauteng provides limitless breathtaking scenery and a range of locations for weddings. Where the province really wins favour are its borders with Limpopo and Mpumalanga to the north and the east, providing wonderfully romantic and easily accessible honeymoon escapes. The Magaliesberg Mountain range that skirts the north eastern borders of Gauteng provides a wonderful milieu for weddings - its purple black foothills forming a lovely backdrop.

The Out-of-doors Wedding

The almost perfect weather in Gauteng makes it an obvious outdoor wedding venue choice. The Magaliesberg range extends for over 120 kilometres from Rustenburg in the west to Bronkhorstspruit Dam in the east, near Pretoria. This highly desirous series of craggy peaks is 100 times older than Everest and a popular locale in which to get married. There are any number of venues that cater for weddings, many of them with little chapels and reception halls, that extend from just north of Johannesburg right into the foothills of the mountains. And for those in search of something a little different, hot air balloon rides can be incorporated into the ceremony from the Magaliesberg. You don’t have to head to the hills, so to speak, in order to have a wedding out of doors either – there are many venues within the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria that provide wonderful places under the open sky in which to marry.

The Garden Wedding

With gardens like the Walter Sisulu National Botanical Gardens in Roodepoort and the Johannesburg Botanical Garden in Emmarentia, garden weddings are high on the list of many a bride’s choice of venue in Gauteng. The Walter Sisulu gardens are set right up against the Roodekrans Ridge, the effortless Witpoortjie waterfall a gentle murmur of water and the gardens alive with over 600 plant species and 220 species of birds. These beautiful gardens that include a rockery, water garden and a series of ponds provide a wonderful site for wedding photographs post wedding ceremony. The Johannesburg Botanic Gardens now have their own wedding Chapel Garden for this very reason, and the beautiful Pretoria National Botanical tea garden caters for weddings too.

Autumn and Winter Weddings

In its favour are the effortlessly clear, wind-free winter days of Gauteng, which is why autumn and winter weddings are a particular strength of this part of the world. Gauteng is one of the most popular winter wedding destinations for this reason, and the elegance of winter attire in the soft, flattering light of late afternoons on a winter’s day together with the allure of large log-filled fire places, piping hot pumpkin soup and spicy warm chocolate desserts sounds more than charming, doesn’t it?

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