Nelson Mandela Bay faces 70 Route 67 fixes

Nelson Mandela Bay’s Route 67 heritage trail needs 70 low-cost interventions before the next cruise ship visit, Graham Taylor said in a Daily Maverick opinion article published Oct. 25.

Taylor said 59,000 cruise passengers arrived in the region during the 2025/26 season, while most visited game reserves and other nature sites instead of the historic centre.

Route 67 was developed as a self-guided heritage walk with 67 public artworks marking Nelson Mandela’s political life. Taylor said the city has spent millions of rand on the project, but crime, poor maintenance, vandalism and inadequate visitor facilities are keeping people away.

Taylor, chairman of the Main Library Friends, said the main public library shows both the demand and the dysfunction around the route. The library has been closed for renovations since 2014, with an initial phase finished in 2019 and the second-phase budget diverted every year since then, according to his account.

Since October 2023, the volunteer group has opened the library for cruise passengers when ships dock in Port Elizabeth, Taylor said. In December 2025, about 2,000 locals and a small number of cruise visitors came to the library on one Sunday after hearing it was open.

Taylor said the group has since hosted 7,000 people on free tours. For scale, that is about 12% of the 59,000 cruise passengers recorded in the 2025/26 season, according to Atlas360 calculations, though the tour figure includes locals.

“Tourism creates jobs,” Taylor said, arguing that the library is one of the few safe visitor stops available in the city centre.

The article described a recent walk by businesses and civil-society groups along the Campanile-to-Donkin section, the central part of Route 67. Taylor said senior municipal managers were invited and accepted, but did not attend or apologise.

The listed problems were basic rather than structural. Taylor said the Campanile has no toilets, facilities at Vuyisile Mini Square have been shut since 2020, and the Donkin’s toilets have been out of order for the past year.

He also said the Campanile lift has not worked for three years, signs direct visitors toward unsafe areas, security guards do not coordinate, paving repairs are not completed, landscaping is weak or absent, and artworks and monuments lack routine care.

The account did not include a response from Nelson Mandela Bay municipal top management. Taylor said officials from the municipality and the Mandela Bay Development Agency who attended the walk already knew the fixes, but lacked top-level support to coordinate them.

The article frames Route 67 as a test of municipal delivery rather than tourism marketing alone. The wider issue is whether a city with a globally recognisable name can convert existing heritage assets into safe, usable public infrastructure for residents and visitors.

Taylor said the 70 interventions could make Route 67 “a safe, clean and functional tourism space within weeks” and before the next cruise ship arrives.