For centuries, rounding the Cape of Good Hope was one of the great fears of seafaring. Here, where the African continent narrows into a rocky promontory battered by two currents, countless ships went down and the legend of the Flying Dutchman was born — the ghost ship doomed to try to round the cape for all eternity. Bartolomeu Dias first called it the Cape of Storms; the King of Portugal renamed it Good Hope, the hope of finally finding the route to the riches of the East.
Today this end of the world is a spectacular national park: sheer cliffs above a deep blue sea, empty beaches, two lighthouses and fynbos vegetation that bursts into flower in spring. The classic shot is the viewpoint with the wooden sign announcing 'Cape of Good Hope, the most south-western point of the African continent', with the waves crashing below. A few kilometres away, the Cape Point promontory ends in a historic lighthouse you can reach by funicular or on foot.
The appeal isn't just the scenery and the history: the reserve is also a small coastal safari. Herds of antelope, mountain zebras, ostriches strolling on the beach and, above all, troops of chacma baboons — clever and cheeky — share the land with visitors. With some caution (baboons can turn aggressive if they smell food) and a bit of time, the Cape of Good Hope is one of the most memorable trips in South Africa and the perfect finale to a journey around the peninsula.
Bartolomeu Dias was the first European to round it, in 1488, and called it the Cape of Storms; King John II of Portugal renamed it Good Hope. It became the gateway to the route to India and the setting for shipwrecks and the legend of the Flying Dutchman. More on its role in the history of navigation and of the colony on the Cape Town history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
For centuries, the Cape of Good Hope was a byword for danger. On this promontory, where Africa narrows to a point in the south, two powerful ocean currents, the cold Benguela on the Atlantic side and the warm Agulhas on the Indian Ocean side, meet violent winds and confused seas that have sunk hundreds of ships over the centuries. Sailors called it, with respect and fear, 'the cape of storms'. Rounding it was, well into the age of steam, one of the most dreaded tests in world navigation.
That fear gave rise to one of the most famous legends of the sea: the Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship doomed to try to round the cape forever without ever succeeding, whose appearance foretold misfortune for anyone who saw it. The legend, popularised in the 19th century and immortalised by Richard Wagner in his 1843 opera, has its natural setting here, in these grey, wind-lashed waters. It is no coincidence that the funicular that climbs to the Cape Point lighthouse today bears that name: the cape and the ghost ship are forever linked in the popular imagination.
The first European to round the Cape of Good Hope was the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias, in 1488. For decades Portugal had been pushing its explorations ever further south along the African coast, looking for a sea route that would lead straight to the spices of India without relying on Arab and Venetian middlemen. Dias, driven off course by a storm, rounded the tip of the continent without realising it and found that the coast turned to the northeast: he had found the passage. In honour of the storms that nearly sank him, he called it the Cape of Storms (Cabo das Tormentas).
When Dias returned to Lisbon with the news, King John II of Portugal decided to rename it something more auspicious: the Cape of Good Hope (Cabo da Boa Esperança), the hope of finally reaching the riches of the East. The bet paid off: ten years later, in 1497-98, Vasco da Gama rounded the same cape and completed the first sea voyage from Europe to India, opening one of the most important trade routes in history. The small rocky promontory at the southern end of Africa thus became one of the geographical keys to the modern world.
After Vasco da Gama, the Cape became the unavoidable waypoint of the 'Carreira da Índia', the India Run: the Portuguese fleets, and later the Dutch, English and French ones, sailing back and forth between Europe and Asia all had to round it. But rounding it was still dangerous, and there was no safe harbour to resupply. Ships that had spent months at sea arrived with crews ravaged by scurvy and holds empty of fresh water. Table Bay, sheltered by Table Mountain, became an occasional anchorage, the 'tavern of the seas', where trinkets and iron were traded with the Khoikhoi for cattle.
It was precisely this logistical need that led the Dutch East India Company, in 1652, to set up a permanent supply station at the foot of the mountain: the seed of Cape Town. So the Cape of Good Hope was not only a feared and celebrated landmark, but the direct reason a great city stands today at the tip of the continent. The rocky point where the sea breaks so furiously was, in a sense, the midwife of modern South Africa. Over time, the steady stream of shipwrecks made it necessary to light up the danger: in 1859 the first lighthouse was lit at the top of Cape Point.
The 1859 lighthouse, built on the highest point of Cape Point, turned out to be ineffective, ironically: it stood so high that it was often hidden by low cloud and fog, exactly when it was needed most. After several notorious shipwrecks, among them the Portuguese steamer Lusitania, which ran aground on nearby rocks in 1911, it was decided to build a second, much lower lighthouse close to the water. It came into service in 1919 and still operates today as one of the most powerful on the South African coast. The old lighthouse survives as a viewpoint, crowning the ride up on the Flying Dutchman funicular.
A very widespread misconception surrounds the cape: the idea that this is where 'the Atlantic and Indian oceans meet'. It is a powerful image, but geographically the official boundary between the two oceans is at Cape Agulhas, some 150 kilometres to the southeast, which is also the true southernmost point of Africa. The Cape of Good Hope is 'only' the southwestern tip of the continent. Even so, it is the one that won the fame, the one that appears on old maps and carries the symbolic weight of centuries of seafaring. At heart, the mix-up is a tribute to its legend.
In the 20th century, the cape's value stopped being measured only in terms of navigation. In 1939 the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve was proclaimed to protect its landscape and, above all, its extraordinary vegetation: the promontory holds one of the largest concentrations of endemic fynbos in the Cape Floral Kingdom, with hundreds of species of proteas, ericas and restios that grow nowhere else on the planet. In 1998 the reserve became part of the newly created Table Mountain National Park, which covers much of the peninsula, and in 2004 it was included in the Cape Floral Region World Heritage Site.
Today, the same place that terrified sailors is one of South Africa's best-loved day trips. Every year, hundreds of thousands of visitors walk its trails to look out from the cape viewpoint, climb to the Cape Point lighthouse, walk along wind-battered cliffs and come across ostriches, antelope, mountain zebras and the troops of chacma baboons that patrol the coast. The promontory keeps something of that old aura: when the wind picks up and the fog tangles among the rocks, it's easy to picture the ghostly sails of the Flying Dutchman trying, once again, to round the cape. But today's visitor crosses it safely, camera in hand, in what was for centuries one of the most feared places in the world.
