Spier Eerste River 
A beautiful river flows through Spier. It’s ancient, powerful and alive.
The Eerste River (meaning “first” in Dutch and Afrikaans) was the reason settlers chose this fertile valley centuries ago. This extraordinary waterway has become central to the farm’s vision. It symbolises the connection between people and place, past and future.
For centuries, the Eerste has flowed from the Jonkershoek mountains toward the nearby Atlantic Ocean, nourishing everything in its path. At Spier, it has become both metaphor and measure, a reminder that all living systems are connected, and that by healing one thread in the web of life strengthens the whole.
Over the past decade, Spier’s nursery team has planted more than 40,000 indigenous trees along its banks, transforming degraded farmland into a thriving riparian forest. Wildlife has returned with porcupines, duikers, bat-eared foxes and even the occasional jackal. Birdlife hums with renewed energy.
“It’s incredible how quickly life comes back,” says Mariota Enthoven. “Even small changes, like rewilding or replanting riverbanks, start a ripple effect.”
“But this work goes deeper than restoration. It’s a meditation on time. The patience required to plant trees whose shade we may never sit under, and on how generosity toward the land becomes a legacy for generations yet to come.”
At Spier, the Eerste River is more than scenery. It’s a teacher. Its rhythm reminds us to slow down and its resilience mirrors nature’s quiet determination to heal. Guests encounter it everywhere, whether crossing one of the farm’s bridges, pausing on a riverside bench or listening to its murmur from a suite shaded by waterlilies.
Even the smallest gestures such as a stone from the river, warmed for a Riverstone Massage, a picnic shared under an old oak, a glass of wine sipped at dusk, become small acts of connection. They’re reminders that renewal happens not only through grand gestures of restoration, but also through presence, through noticing.
“The river connects everybody along its banks,” says Mariota. “We are custodians of this river, and also custodians of our own biology, because we are 70 percent water. How we engage with these water bodies matters deeply.”
The river’s influence flows beyond ecology. In the current exhibition Water-Verse: Traces of the Traceless, artist Hanien Conradie explores water as spirit and mirror, her decade-long dialogue with rivers, droughts and floods echoing Spier’s own journey. Both farm and artist see water not just as a resource, but as a consciousness, reflecting how we live, what we value and what we choose to restore.
“We are only here for a moment, and the river is constantly changing,” says Mariota. “The work we do is for the future. When you plant a forest, you see saplings but it takes decades for them to mature.”
This long view infuses everything at Spier: an understanding that regeneration is not a campaign, but a commitment and a way of being that honours what came before and nurtures what’s still to come.
The Eerste River reminds us that the health of the land and the well-being of those who live upon it are, and always will be, inseparable. DM
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