A guided one-hour tour through the interior of the decommissioned SA Navy submarine SAS Assegaai at Cole Point in Simon’s Town, with a free display area and a Garden of Remembrance alongside.
The SAS Assegaai is a real submarine, displayed on land at Cole Point on the Simon’s Town waterfront, and the tour takes you inside it. A guide walks you through the boat compartment by compartment — the control room, the torpedo space, the cramped bunks wedged between machinery — explaining how a crew lived and worked beneath the surface during the Cold War. Children are allowed to sit at the controls.
Tours run for about an hour and leave every twenty to thirty minutes, capped at ten visitors each, which keeps the group small enough to hear the guide inside a steel hull. Alongside the submarine there is a free display area and the Garden of Remembrance, which honours South African submariners and pays particular tribute to those lost at sea.
The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday from 09h30 to 15h30, with the last guided tour starting at 15h00. It closes on Mondays other than public and school holidays. You do not have to book: visitors arriving without a booking are allocated a place on the next available tour, though with a ten-person cap a call ahead is sensible on a busy day.
The tour is family friendly and best suited to children aged eight and older, although eight is guidance rather than a minimum age at the door. The confined spaces and listening involved make it better suited to children who are comfortable with a structured guided tour.
Highlights
- Guided tour inside a real decommissioned submarine
- Tours capped at ten visitors
- Departures every 20 to 30 minutes
- Garden of Remembrance on site
Tips
Visitors arriving without a booking are placed on the next available tour. With only ten places per departure, a call ahead still helps on a busy day. Arrive well before 15h00 if you want the last guided tour rather than the free display area on its own.