Bethany is the oldest village in the Barossa, established in 1842 by a group of German Lutheran immigrants who had sailed for South Australia to escape religious persecution. The village layout is distinctive — the settlers divided the creek-side land into narrow strips running back from the road, following the pattern of the villages they had left in Silesia. That Hufeisen (horseshoe) plan is still visible today.
The old cemetery behind the Lutheran church contains the graves of some of the valley's founding families. The village itself is tiny — a handful of houses on the main road — but walking through it on a quiet morning gives a genuine sense of the 19th-century origins of what is now one of Australia's most commercially successful wine regions.