Western Cape Poultry Club show 2025
...by a spectator who knows little to nothing about poultry shows.[After reviewing all the many photographs that I took for this show, I have decided to split my write-up into parts which I will try to post here regularly as I work through the information.]
[For those of you who are not familiar with how BackYard Chickens' images are linked to a gallery, please click on the image that may appear cropped square here to view the full picture which is in a gallery that I created to keep the images in. My full images are cropped either landscape or portrait, and none are cropped in a square shape.]
PART 1 – THE VENUE
This year the annual Western Cape Poultry Club show was held from the 3rd to the 6th June 2025, at the showgrounds in the valley town of Villiersdorp, in the Overberg district of the Western Cape province of South Africa. Villiersdorp is situated alongside the Theewaterskloof Dam which is the largest dam, filling the majority of the valley floor, in the Western Cape, and the seventh largest dam in South Africa.The show was closed to the public over the first two days of the event, Wednesday and Thursday, while the main judging of the poultry took place. Friday opened the show to everyone and we attended on the Saturday, taking us about an hour and a half to drive there by car under rain cloud dark skies and in sometimes severe rain conditions. Along the way we saw some landslides before and while driving through the Franschhoek Pass, travelling over into the valley where the Theewaterskloof Dam is found below the Hottentots Holland Mountain Catchment Area. After entering the town from the South, we drove past one of Villiersdorp’s attractions, namely the Alwyn Vintcent, one of the last remaining South African built steam tugs. The 30m tug, which was previously docked at the V&A Waterfront harbour in the city of Cape Town, was sold to the Villiersdorp’s branch of the Western Cape Tractor and Engine Club, saving it from being scrapped, and they then set about restoring it. Turning off the main road, we made our way to the town’s showgrounds and arrived at the venue a minute or two before 9 o’clock in the morning, which happened to be perfect timing for us, yay.
This is the third poultry show that I have attended and this venue is to me the best of the three because it both has large well-maintained halls with toilets as well as has fair scenery of mountains. The poultry were divided up into two separate halls with the one hall hosting the show champions and all the standard sized chickens (each lively and competing for sound supremacy), and a second hall hosting the ducks, geese, bantam chickens and one champion turkey.
