City of Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality
— — the metro the airport opens onto.
Not only on a wall.
“The East Rand metro, formed in 2000 by amalgamating nine former towns of the old gold-mining belt — Kempton Park, Benoni, Boksburg, Germiston, Edenvale, Alberton, Brakpan, Springs, and Nigel — into a single municipality of about four million people. OR Tambo International, the busiest airport in Africa, sits inside it. So do the wetlands at Korsman Bird Sanctuary in Benoni and a stretch of the old rand that once dug the gold the city of Johannesburg was built on. The name is Tsonga for *place of peace*.
City of Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The City of Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality covers about 1,975 square kilometres on the East Rand of Gauteng province, with a 2022 census population of roughly 4.07 million. It was constituted in 2000 by merging nine East Rand councils into a single Category A metropolitan municipality. The seat sits at Germiston, and the metro borders Johannesburg to the west and the City of Tshwane to the north. The Witwatersrand reef runs through it, and so does much of the country's manufacturing belt.
The name Ekurhuleni was chosen in 2000 from Xitsonga and is generally translated as *place of peace*. The towns that compose it grew from gold strikes along the East Rand from the 1880s onward — Germiston was founded in 1886, Boksburg the same year, Benoni from a farm of that name in 1881. Apartheid-era townships including Tembisa, Daveyton, and KwaThema lie inside the metro and remain among the largest population centres in Gauteng outside Soweto.
OR Tambo International Airport, which lies inside Ekurhuleni, handled about 21 million passengers in 2023 and is the busiest airport in Africa. The Gautrain links the airport and Rhodesfield station to Johannesburg's Sandton and Pretoria in under 40 minutes. Korsman Bird Sanctuary in Benoni protects an urban wetland with over 200 recorded species. The metro's elevation is about 1,670 metres, so summer thunderstorms arrive most afternoons from October through March.