Auwal Mosque

Auwal Mosque stands on Dorp Street, on the lower slope of Bo-Kaap, in a terrace that gives very little away from the pavement. The frontage is long and low, rendered in a dark grey green, with brown shuttered windows and a small arched doorway set back under a name plaque. A slender minaret with a […]

Church Square

Church Square is a small paved square in the middle of Cape Town’s city centre, set behind Groote Kerk at the corner of Spin and Parliament Streets. There is no gate, no ticket and no building to enter, and the whole space can be crossed in well under a minute. What makes it worth stopping […]

Mamre Moravian Mission Station

Mamre lies about fifty kilometres north of central Cape Town, reached off the R27 by way of the R307 between Atlantis and Darling. It is a working town of several thousand people, and on its western side stands the reason to come: a Moravian mission werf where the church, the parsonage, former military barracks, a […]

Slangkop Lighthouse

Slangkop Lighthouse stands on the open Atlantic shore just west of Kommetjie, towards the southern end of the Cape Peninsula. At thirty-three metres it is the tallest cast-iron lighthouse on the South African coast, and it is still a working navigational light rather than a preserved monument. The setting does as much work as the […]

Green Point Lighthouse

Green Point Lighthouse is a small, sharply painted tower on the seaward side of Beach Road at Mouille Point, where the Atlantic comes straight up against the edge of the city. The tower is masonry, about sixteen metres tall, square rather than round, and wrapped in broad red and white diagonal bands. A railed balcony […]

Groote Kerk

Groote Kerk stands on Adderley Street in the middle of Cape Town’s business district, hemmed in by office blocks and traffic. The front is a broad painted gable with a classical pediment, a row of small pinnacles along the roofline, and tall windows that come to a Gothic point — an unusual combination that makes […]

Cape Town City Hall & Grand Parade

Cape Town City Hall stands on the edge of the Grand Parade, a long Edwardian facade in honey-coloured stone with a clock tower at its centre and Table Mountain filling the sky behind it. It is one of the most photographed buildings in the city and one of the easiest to underestimate, because the open […]

Parliament of South Africa

The Parliament of South Africa occupies a walled precinct of historic buildings at the top of Cape Town’s city centre, between Plein Street and the eastern edge of the Company’s Garden. It is one of the city’s most significant landmarks and also one of its least understood, because most visitors meet it as an imposing […]

University of Cape Town Upper Campus

The University of Cape Town Upper Campus is one of South Africa’s most recognisable university settings, combining historic architecture, mountain scenery and broad views from the slopes of Devil’s Peak. UCT traces its origins to the South African College, founded in 1829, and became the University of Cape Town in 1918. Upper Campus occupies part […]

Rhodes Memorial

Rhodes Memorial is a prominent historic landmark on the eastern slopes of Devil’s Peak, combining monumental architecture, broad views across Cape Town and a contested chapter of South African history. Designed by Sir Herbert Baker and completed in 1912, the memorial commemorates Cecil John Rhodes, whose role in British colonial expansion and racial politics makes […]