The Victoria Falls Hotel | |
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General information | |
Address | 1 Mallet Drive, PO Box 10 |
Town or city | Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe |
Country | Zimbabwe |
Coordinates | 17°55′51″S25°50′33″E / 17.9307°S 25.8426°E |
Opened | 1904 |
Owner | National Railways of Zimbabwe |
Management | African Sun Limited & Meikles |
Other information | |
Number of rooms | 161 |
Website | |
www |
The Victoria Falls Hotel is a historic luxury hotel at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, dramatically situated with a view of the Second Gorge and the Victoria Falls Bridge from its terrace.
It is a member of The Leading Hotels of the World marketing organisation and managed by African Sun Limited and Meikles.
The hotel was opened in 1904 to accommodate passengers on the newly built railway of Rhodesia Railways Ltd, part of the planned Cape to Cairo Railway. Later it was a staging post for the BOAC flying boat service between Southampton and South Africa. In September 1904, Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein and her daughter, Princess Helena Victoria became the first royal guests of the newly opened hotel. The hotel has accommodated royal visitors on several occasions, including King George VI and his family in April 1947. [1]
The hotel has been the site of a number of important political meetings. In 1949 Roy Welensky organised a conference there to discuss the creation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and in 1963, the Victoria Falls Conference at the hotel led to the breakup of the federation.
It hosted the 1975 Victoria Falls Conference to try to sort out Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence that followed the break-up of the Federation.
Victoria Falls is a waterfall on the Zambezi River, located on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. It is one of the world's largest waterfalls, with a width of 1,708 m (5,604 ft). The region around it is inhabited by several species of plants and animals.
Northern Rhodesia was a British protectorate in Southern Africa, now the independent country of Zambia. It was formed in 1911 by amalgamating the two earlier protectorates of Barotziland-North-Western Rhodesia and North-Eastern Rhodesia. It was initially administered, as were the two earlier protectorates, by the British South Africa Company (BSAC), a chartered company, on behalf of the British Government. From 1924, it was administered by the British Government as a protectorate, under similar conditions to other British-administered protectorates, and the special provisions required when it was administered by BSAC were terminated.
Sir Roland "Roy" Welensky was a Northern Rhodesian politician and the second and last Prime Minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
The Victoria Falls Bridge crosses the Zambezi River just below the Victoria Falls and is built over the Second Gorge of the falls. As the river forms the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, the bridge links the two countries and has border posts on the approaches to both ends, at the towns of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, and Livingstone, Zambia.
Livingstone is a city in Zambia. Until 1935, it served as the capital of Northern Rhodesia. Lying 10 km (6 mi) to the north of the Zambezi River, it is a tourism attraction center for the Victoria Falls and a border town with road and rail connections to Zimbabwe on the other side of the Victoria Falls. A historic British colonial city, its present population was enumerated at 177,393 inhabitants at the 2022 census. It is named after David Livingstone, the Scottish explorer and missionary who was the first European to explore the area. Until 2011, Livingstone was the provincial capital of Zambia's Southern Province.
Victoria Falls, popularly known as Vic Falls, is a resort town and city in the province of Matabeleland North, Zimbabwe. It lies on the southern bank of the Zambezi River at the western end of Victoria Falls themselves. According to the 2022 Population Census, the town had a population of 35,199.
Zambia Railways (ZR) is the national railway company of Zambia and one of the two major railway organisations in Zambia. The other system is the binational TAZARA Railway (TAZARA) that interconnects with the ZR at Kapiri Mposhi and provides a link to the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam.
The National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ), formerly Rhodesia Railways (RR), is a Bulawayo headquartered state-owned enterprise that operates the country's national railway system. It was established in 1893 and is governed by an Act of Parliament. It has a commercial-administrative center in Harare and a supply center in Gweru. The Zimbabwean railway system was largely constructed during the 20th century.
The following lists events that happened during 1975 in the Republic of Rhodesia.
The Rhodesian Air Force (RhAF) was an air force based in Salisbury which represented several entities under various names between 1935 and 1980: originally serving the British self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia, it was the air arm of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland between 1953 and 31 December 1963; of Southern Rhodesia once again from 1 January 1964; and of the unrecognised nation of Rhodesia following its Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain on 11 November 1965.
The Mulobezi Railway was constructed to carry timber from Mulobezi to Livingstone in the Southern Province of Zambia, when the country was Northern Rhodesia. The line uses the 1,067 mm narrow gauge, also known as 'Cape gauge', shared by all main line railways in Southern Africa.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Zambia:
Zambia, officially known as the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. The neighbouring countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Tanzania to the north-east, Malawi to the east, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia to the south, and Angola to the west. The capital city is Lusaka, located in the southeast of the country. The population is concentrated mainly around the capital and the Copperbelt to the northwest.
The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, also known as the Central African Federation (CAF), was a colonial federation that consisted of three southern African territories: the self-governing British colony of Southern Rhodesia and the British protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. It existed between 1953 and 1963.
Lusaka is the capital and largest city of Zambia. It is one of the fastest-developing cities in southern Africa. Lusaka is in the southern part of the central plateau at an elevation of about 1,279 metres (4,196 ft). As of 2019, the city's population was about 3.3 million, while the urban population is estimated at 2.5 million in 2018. Lusaka is the centre of both commerce and government in Zambia and connects to the country's four main highways heading north, south, east, and west. English is the official language of the city administration, while Bemba and Nyanja are the commonly-spoken street languages.
The Victoria Falls Conference took place on 26 August 1975 aboard a South African Railways train halfway across the Victoria Falls Bridge on the border between the unrecognised state of Rhodesia and Zambia. It was the culmination of the "détente" policy introduced and championed by B. J. Vorster, the Prime Minister of South Africa, which was then under apartheid and was attempting to improve its relations with the Frontline States to Rhodesia's north, west and east by helping to produce a settlement in Rhodesia. The participants in the conference were a delegation led by the Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith on behalf of his government, and a nationalist delegation attending under the banner of Abel Muzorewa's African National Council (UANC), which for this conference also incorporated delegates from the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and the Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (FROLIZI). Vorster and the Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda acted as mediators in the conference, which was held on the border in an attempt to provide a venue both sides would accept as neutral.
The British South Africa Company's administration of what became Rhodesia was chartered in 1889 by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, and began with the Pioneer Column's march north-east to Mashonaland in 1890. Empowered by its charter to acquire, govern and develop the area north of the Transvaal in southern Africa, the Company, headed by Cecil Rhodes, raised its own armed forces and carved out a huge bloc of territory through treaties, concessions and occasional military action, most prominently overcoming the Matabele army in the First and Second Matabele Wars of the 1890s. By the turn of the century, Rhodes's Company held a vast, land-locked country, bisected by the Zambezi river. It officially named this land Rhodesia in 1895, and ran it until the early 1920s.
Godfrey Martin Huggins, 1st Viscount Malvern, was a Rhodesian politician and physician. He served as the fourth Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia from 1933 to 1953 and remained in office as the first prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland until October 1956, becoming the longest serving prime minister in British Commonwealth history, until 1961.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.
Parliament House in Harare was an active legislative building for 124 years, acting as the base of the Legislative Assembly of Rhodesia, the Parliament of Rhodesia and finally the Parliament of Zimbabwe. In November 2023, the Parliament of Zimbabwe relocated to the New Zimbabwe Parliament Building in Mount Hampden.