A Walk Through Old Stellenbosch

Start at the top end and walk down. Dorp Street is the second-oldest road in South Africa and carries the longest row of old facades in the country still standing together, which sounds like a plaque and reads much better in person: oaks down both sides, the water furrows still running, and a working street rather than a preserved one. An hour if you stop, half that if you do not.

Oom Samie se Winkel is at number 84 and has been trading on this street for more than a century. It is a shop rather than a museum, and it is the one door on Dorp Street you can walk through without paying for anything.

Dorp Street delivers you to the Braak, the old military parade ground that is now simply the green in the middle of town. The Moederkerk stands a short way off on Drostdy Street and the Rhenish Church sits on the square itself. Both are working congregations rather than museums, so take them as architecture seen from the outside.

The Kruithuis at the lower end is the reason to cross. It was finished in 1777 to hold powder and shot for a town that was never attacked, and it spent the next two centuries as the site of the Friday market, then as a fire station, then as a national monument. It is the only Dutch East India Company powder magazine still standing in the country. Inside there are seventeenth-century signalling cannons, firearms and uniforms. Twenty minutes is enough.

From the Braak it is a few minutes to Ryneveld Street, where the next two stops stand at opposite ends of the same block. The Village Museum is four restored town houses, dated 1709, around 1750, 1782 and the 1850s, shown as four separate households rather than one collection, with guides in period dress and the gardens planted to match each era.

It is the stop on this walk that most repays a full hour. The jump between the first house and the last is the clearest illustration anywhere in town of what happened to Stellenbosch in its first century and a half.

Almost nobody walks the extra block, and they should. The university museum holds more than six thousand pieces of traditional African art, masks and sculpture and textiles from across the continent, which makes it one of the largest collections of its kind in South Africa. There is no charge to walk in.

A changing programme of temporary exhibitions runs alongside the permanent holdings and turns over through the year, so it is worth seeing what is on before you go. Older guidebooks still call it the Sasol Art Museum.

The most serious art in Stellenbosch, and it costs nothing to walk into, which is an unusual combination anywhere. The collection was built privately by Anton and Huberte Rupert from the 1940s onward, so it reads as one household’s taste rather than a survey: Irma Stern, Maggie Laubser and Alexis Preller carry the South African rooms, with Rodin and Kaethe Kollwitz sculpture and a set of French tapestries alongside them.

The building, opened in 2005, is quiet and well lit and does not fight the work. An hour is enough. It is the one stop here that is closed on a Monday.

Finish here. It is the oldest university botanical garden in South Africa, it is small enough to walk in three quarters of an hour, and it is the only stop on this list that opens every day of the week. Welwitschia, a bonsai collection, glasshouses of tropical and arid plants, and a tea room under the trees.

It is also the reason this walk still works on a Sunday. When the Kruithuis and the university museum are shut and the town is quiet, the garden is open and two minutes from the square.