Few cities in the world have a backdrop like Cape Town's: a mountain with a perfectly flat top, Table Mountain, rising more than a thousand metres right behind the centre, sometimes wrapped in a 'tablecloth' of cloud that spills down its slopes. At its feet lie the icy Atlantic, white-sand beaches, neighbourhoods of brightly painted houses and a peninsula that stretches south to the legendary Cape of Good Hope. It is, without question, one of the great scenic destinations on the planet.
But Cape Town isn't just scenery. It's South Africa's oldest city, founded in 1652 as a supply station for ships between Europe and Asia, and that makes it a crossroads of cultures: Dutch and English heritage, the Cape Malay community of the Bo-Kaap, Xhosa and African memory, and the long shadow of apartheid, whose most painful symbol — the Robben Island prison, where Mandela was held — can be seen from the harbour. Eating, drinking wine and walking around here is also a way of reading that history.
Travellers find a surprisingly easy-going and vibrant city: a top-class food scene, some of the world's best vineyards less than an hour away, shark and whale safaris along the coast, mountain trails that start in the middle of town and an infectious outdoor lifestyle. With common sense about safety, it's a destination people fall in love with, and the perfect gateway to the rest of South Africa.
Cape Town began in 1652 as a resupply station for the Dutch East India Company, became a British colony in the 19th century, was a central stage of apartheid in the 20th and today is a democratic, multicultural metropolis. Its full history — from Jan van Riebeeck to Mandela's release — is on the destination's history page.
Read the full history ↓The oldest city in the country, birthplace of the 1652 European settlement and the setting of slavery, forced removals and Mandela's imprisonment on Robben Island.
Read the history of Cape Town and the peninsula →They depart from Stellenbosch, 40 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before there were streets, long before a European ship dropped anchor in Table Bay, the south-western tip of Africa already belonged to someone. The Khoikhoi, who herded sheep and cattle, and the San, who were hunter-gatherers (together sometimes called the Khoisan), had lived in the region for thousands of years. They moved around the peninsula with their herds and knew the freshwater springs that ran down from Table Mountain. They also traded along the coast. In their language the great flat mountain had its own name: Hoerikwaggo, 'the mountain in the sea'.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to round the cape. In 1488 the navigator Bartolomeu Dias sailed around the tip of the continent while looking for the route to India. According to tradition, he named it the Cape of Storms. King John II of Portugal, hopeful about the route to Asia, later renamed it the Cape of Good Hope. But the Portuguese didn't settle there. The Cape had a reputation for danger, and their crews clashed violently with the Khoikhoi. For more than a century Table Bay was just an occasional stop. Ships heading east called in for water and swapped iron and beads for cattle with the local herders. People called it the 'tavern of the seas'.
Everything changed on 6 April 1652. That day three ships of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) landed in Table Bay under the command of Jan van Riebeeck. His mission wasn't to found a colony or convert anyone. He was there to set up a supply station, a vegetable garden and a hospital. On their very long voyage between Amsterdam and the Spice Islands, the VOC fleets could stop there to load fresh vegetables and meat and fight scurvy. The newcomers built an earth fort, the origin of today's Castle of Good Hope, the oldest colonial building in the country. They also planted a vegetable garden that still exists: today it is the Company's Garden, a public garden right in the city centre.
What began as a pantry soon became something more. The Company needed labour and food, so it released some employees from service so they could become farmers ('vrijburgers', free burghers). Above all, it began importing enslaved people from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Ceylon and the Malay Archipelago. This enslaved population of Asian origin gave rise to the Cape Malay community. It also shaped much of the Cape's identity, its cuisine and its language: Afrikaans also has roots in the speech of enslaved people. Meanwhile, the Khoikhoi were pushed off their land, devastated by wars and by a smallpox epidemic in 1713, and forced into servitude. For the Indigenous peoples, the 'peaceful' founding of the city was a catastrophe.
For a century and a half the Cape was Dutch, but the Napoleonic Wars gave it a new owner. Britain was determined to control the sea route to India. It occupied the Cape in 1795, briefly handed it back and took it for good in 1806. In 1814 the Cape Colony officially became British. The British brought their language and their legal system. In 1834 they also abolished slavery, which freed tens of thousands of enslaved people. It was a milestone, although inequality and disguised forced labour continued.
Tension grew between the settlers of Dutch origin (the Boers, or Afrikaners) and the British administration. In the 1830s thousands of Boers set off on the Great Trek into the interior to escape British rule and found their own republics. Meanwhile, Cape Town grew into the colony's great port and its capital, with a parliament, a university and a society rigidly ranked by race and origin. Then diamonds were discovered in the interior (1867), followed by gold (1886). The rush that followed transformed all of South Africa. At the end of the century it led to the bloody Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), which left Britain in control of the whole territory. The Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, and Cape Town became the seat of Parliament. It still has that role today as the country's legislative capital.
In 1948 the Afrikaner National Party won the elections, in which only white people could vote. It turned racial segregation into state policy: apartheid, which means 'separateness' in Afrikaans. A string of laws classified every resident by race and banned mixed marriages. The best neighbourhoods, beaches, benches and jobs were reserved for white people. The Black, mixed-race ('coloured') and Indian majority was confined to poor areas on the outskirts.
Cape Town saw one of the most brutal episodes of this policy. District Six was a central neighbourhood: poor, but lively and mixed. The descendants of enslaved people lived there alongside immigrants, musicians and traders. In 1966 the regime declared it a 'white area'. Through the 1970s it demolished the houses and forcibly removed some 60,000 people to the bleak Cape Flats. Today the District Six Museum keeps that memory alive with street names, testimonies and salvaged objects. A few kilometres out to sea, Robben Island prison was becoming the symbol of repression. The regime locked up Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Robert Sobukwe and hundreds of other political prisoners there. Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison on the island. He broke stones in the lime quarry and secretly organised the resistance. The country's most beautiful city was also the scene of its deepest injustice.
History took its brightest turn in the very heart of the city. On 11 February 1990, after 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela was released. That same afternoon he spoke to a jubilant crowd from the balcony of Cape Town's City Hall, overlooking the Grand Parade. 'I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination,' he had said at his trial. On that day, fist raised, he promised that the struggle would go on until South Africa was free. Four years later, in 1994, the first democratic elections with universal suffrage made Mandela president and put an end to apartheid.
Democratic Cape Town is a city still being built, and it has its tensions. Some neighbourhoods are extremely wealthy. The Cape Flats and the townships around the airport are painfully unequal, and the legacy of apartheid still shapes the map there. It is one of the most visited cities in Africa, and its mountain, vineyards, beaches and food draw tourists from all over the world. It also faces real problems with crime, housing and water. In 2018 a drought brought it to the brink of 'Day Zero', and that remains a warning. For travellers, exploring Cape Town means enjoying one of the most beautiful cityscapes on the planet. On its streets, on Robben Island and in District Six, you can also read one of the most intense stories of the 20th century: a country that was split in two and, against all odds, chose reconciliation.
