Durban began as Port Natal after a Christmas sighting in 1497
Vasco da Gama named this Indian Ocean coast Natal for Christmas in fourteen ninety-seven. English traders under Francis Farewell and Henry Fynn raised a post in eighteen twenty-four; Shaka granted them bay land that August, and in eighteen thirty-five settlers renamed the town for Cape governor Benjamin D'Urban.
Zulu eThekwini comes from a word for bay or lagoon. Today's municipality spans about two thousand five hundred fifty-six square kilometres and held four point two million people in twenty twenty-two, while the twenty eleven city-limit count was five hundred ninety-five thousand sixty-one. It ranks as South Africa's third-most populous city after Johannesburg and Cape Town, and its harbour is called the busiest in sub-Saharan Africa and the fourth-busiest in the Southern Hemisphere. Hot wet summers and mild dry winters define a humid subtropical climate with about one thousand nine millimetres of rain a year.
Hunter-gatherers left traces in the nearby Drakensberg as far back as one hundred thousand years before present. A Dutch purchase tale from sixteen eighty-nine claims the Bay of Natal was bought from Abambo people after the wrecked Stavenisse crew translated; the lasting colonial founding, though, is the eighteen twenty-four Farewell grant of land stretching sixteen kilometres south, forty north, and one hundred sixty inland. Britain annexed the Natalia Republic in eighteen forty-three after the Congella siege, when Dick King rode to Grahamstown for relief. Borough status came in eighteen fifty-four; city status followed in nineteen thirty-five.
From eighteen sixty, indentured workers from British India reshaped demography alongside Zulu, White, and Coloured communities. Art Deco stamped many facades, and Moses Mabhida Stadium rose for the twenty ten World Cup. As of twenty eighteen the metro supplied about fifty-nine point nine percent of KwaZulu-Natal's GDP and nine point six percent of South Africa's, led by finance, services, manufacturing, trade, transport, and tourism. UNESCO named Durban Africa's first City of Literature. The bay that sailors once feared still anchors a polyglot port metropolis.
Source: Durban
