Vredefort is a small farming town in the Free State province of South Africa with cattle, peanuts, sorghum, sunflowers and maize being farmed. It is home to 3,000 residents. The town was established in 1876 on a farm called Visgat, on the Vredefort impact structure, the largest and oldest visible bolide impact crater in the world. It was this approximately 10-kilometre wide bolide that led to the preservation of the gold-bearing reefs of the Free State some 2.02 billion years ago.