Cape Winelands District Municipality


The Cape Winelands District Municipality, formerly the Boland District Municipality, is a district municipality located in the Boland region of the Western Cape province of South Africa. As of 2011, it had a population of 787,490. The largest towns in the municipality are Paarl, Worcester, Stellenbosch and Wellington.

Geography

The boundaries of this municipality, which covers an area of, coincide roughly with the boundaries of the geographical area that has been known since the early days of the Cape Colony as "The Boland". In Afrikaans Boland means "up land" or "the higher land" or "the land above". However, the term "Boland", as originally used, was a loose concept, with no defined borders. The Boland is generally mountainous, with range after range of beautiful and isolated sandstone peaks reaching towards 2000m but also has broad, fertile valleys that are home to some of the country's finest vineyards.
The region has a Mediterranean climate, with hot, dry summers are hot and cool, damp winters, with snow on the peaks during August and September. The diverse geography includes peaks, ranges, escarpments, valleys, cliffs, rivers, pools, waterfalls, screes, canyons, springs, forests, caves and other natural features.
The Cape Winelands District Municipality is divided into five local municipalities, which are described in the following table.

Adjacent municipalities

The council of the Cape Winelands District Municipality consists of forty-one councillors, of whom seventeen are directly elected by party-list proportional representation. The other twenty-four councillors are appointed by the councils of the constituent local municipalities: eight by Drakenstein, five each by Stellenbosch and Breede Valley, and three each by Witzenberg and Langeberg.
After then elections of 3 August 2016 the Democratic Alliance obtained a majority of 27 seats on the council. The executive mayor is Dr Helena von Schlicht of the DA, and the deputy mayor is Dirk Swart, also of the DA.
The following table shows the composition of the council after the 2016 election.
The following table shows the results of the election of the seventeen directly-elected councillors.

Demographics

The following statistics are from the 2011 Census. Note that due to fuzzing applied to statistics, columns may not sum to exactly the indicated total.

First language

Race

Gender

Age