Pretoria is the calm, green face of the Gauteng metropolitan area: South Africa's administrative capital, home to the government and the embassies, with tree-lined avenues, imposing official buildings and a much more relaxed pace than neighbouring Johannesburg, just 50 kilometres away. In October, when its thousands of jacarandas bloom and the streets are covered in a purple carpet, it more than earns its nickname of 'Jacaranda City'.
It is a city full of history and of symbols in tension. Here you will find the Union Buildings, the seat of government where Nelson Mandela was sworn in and where a nine-metre statue of him now embraces the city; but also the Voortrekker Monument, the great memorial of Afrikaner nationalism, and Freedom Park, the monument of democratic South Africa that answers it from the hill opposite. Exploring Pretoria means reading the layers of the national story in stone and gardens: Boer power, apartheid and reconciliation.
Less touristy than Cape Town or Kruger, Pretoria is almost always visited as a day trip from Johannesburg —it is connected by the Gautrain— or as a stopover when arriving in or leaving the country. With museums, monuments, good restaurants and a lively university scene, it offers a calm, rewarding day for understanding where South Africa comes from and where it is heading.
Pretoria was founded in 1855 by the Boer Voortrekkers and named after Andries Pretorius, leader of the victory over the Zulus at Blood River. It was the capital of the South African Republic, a prize in the Anglo-Boer War and, during the 20th century, the seat of the apartheid government; in 1994 it also became the stage for Mandela's inauguration and the new democratic order. You can read the full story on the Pretoria history page.
Read the full history ↓The gold province: the metropolis that sprang from the Witwatersrand reef, the township of Soweto where the struggle against apartheid was fought, and the administrative capital, Pretoria.
Read the history of Johannesburg and Pretoria (Gauteng) →They depart from Johannesburgo, 54 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Pretoria was born out of the epic of the Great Trek. In the 1830s and 1840s, thousands of Boer settlers — the Voortrekkers — left the British Cape Colony and migrated into the interior of southern Africa in search of land and a state of their own. In that expansion, which clashed violently with the African peoples already living in the region, they founded independent republics. One of them was the South African Republic (the Transvaal), and for its capital they chose a fertile valley beside the Apies River.
The city was formally founded in 1855 by Marthinus Pretorius, who named it after his father, Andries Pretorius, the leader who had commanded the Voortrekkers at the Battle of Blood River in 1838 against the Zulu kingdom. That origin explains why Pretoria carried the symbolic weight of Afrikaner nationalism from the very start: it is, in a way, the monument-city of the Boers, something that would later take physical form in the Voortrekker Monument.
In 1860, Pretoria became the capital of the South African Republic. It was still a small, remote town, but its role as the seat of the Boer government put it at the centre of the events about to shake the whole region, when the discovery of gold and diamonds changed the balance of power in southern Africa forever.
The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886, just a few kilometres from Pretoria, changed the fate of the Boer republic. The wealth underground drew the appetite of the British Empire, which wanted to control those deposits and unify southern Africa under its rule. Tensions between Britain and the South African Republic of President Paul Kruger — whose modest house still stands in central Pretoria — escalated until they led to the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902).
It was a harsh conflict and, in many ways, a modern and cruel one: unable to defeat the Boer guerrilla campaign, the British turned to a scorched-earth policy and to confining civilians — women, children and Africans — in concentration camps, where tens of thousands of people died of disease and hunger. Pretoria fell to the British in June 1900, and the war ended in 1902 with the Treaty of Vereeniging, signed nearby, which brought the independence of the Boer republics to an end.
In 1910, the former colonies and republics were unified as the Union of South Africa, under British rule but with broad self-government for the white minority. Pretoria was named the administrative capital of the new country (while Cape Town became the legislative capital and Bloemfontein the judicial one), a division that remains in place today. To mark that role, the Union Buildings were built and opened in 1913.
As the seat of government, Pretoria was the centre of political power in South Africa throughout the 20th century, and so also of the apartheid regime established in 1948. The system of racial segregation that shaped the country's life for almost half a century was designed and run from its official buildings. In 1949, on a hill south of the city, the Voortrekker Monument was opened, and it became a shrine to the Afrikaner nationalism that gave the regime its ideological backbone.
Pretoria was also a stage for repression and for justice used as a weapon. Part of the Rivonia Trial (1963-1964) took place in the Palace of Justice on Church Square, where Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress were sentenced to life imprisonment. It was in that courtroom that Mandela gave his famous speech declaring that he was prepared to die for the ideal of a free and democratic society. For decades, Pretoria Central Prison was a place where political prisoners were executed.
In this way the city built up contradictory layers: capital of the Boer epic, seat of the British Empire after the war, and then the administrative brain of apartheid. Each of these stories left its mark in the stone of its monuments and buildings, turning Pretoria into a physical map of the history of power in South Africa.
On 10 May 1994, Pretoria's Union Buildings were the setting for one of the brightest moments in South African history: the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first president elected democratically by the country's entire population, after the first free elections with universal suffrage. Before leaders from around the world, the very building from which apartheid had been run became a symbol of the birth of the 'rainbow nation'.
Democratic South Africa set out to give the city's memory new meaning without erasing it. In 2007, Freedom Park opened on a hill facing the Voortrekker Monument: a memorial honouring those who fought for freedom throughout the country's history, deliberately in dialogue with the Afrikaner monument and offering a broader, more inclusive reading of the past. And in 2013, after Mandela's death, a nine-metre statue of him with open arms was put up in the gardens of the Union Buildings; today it is one of the city's best-loved images.
This process of symbolic repair also sparked debate. In 2005, the metropolitan municipality that includes Pretoria was renamed Tshwane, a name with African roots, and ever since there has been discussion about whether the city itself should adopt it. The coexistence of the name 'Pretoria' — tied to the Boer past — with the new name reflects the unresolved tensions between the different memories that live side by side in South Africa.
Today Pretoria is South Africa's administrative capital and a city with an unhurried pace, tree-lined avenues, pleasant residential neighbourhoods such as Brooklyn and Waterkloff, and a strong diplomatic and university presence. The University of Pretoria and the University of South Africa (UNISA) give it a young population and an active cultural life. In October, the blossoming of its more than seventy thousand jacarandas turns it into a purple city, one of the most beautiful urban natural spectacles in the country.
Like the rest of the country, Pretoria lives with the contrasts of post-apartheid South Africa: alongside prosperous neighbourhoods, informal settlements and deep inequality persist, and the spatial legacy of segregation can still be seen in its geography. The administrative capital shares with Johannesburg, just 50 kilometres away and linked by the Gautrain, the challenges of a huge and uneven metropolitan region, the most populous in the country.
For travellers, Pretoria offers a calm day rich in history: reading the layers of the national story in its facing monuments and official buildings — from Boer power to apartheid and reconciliation — enjoying its green spaces and its food, and so rounding out an understanding of a country that is still negotiating, in stone and in politics, how to tell its own past.
