Botterblom Nature Reserve

Botterblom Nature Reserve is 3.6 hectares on Botterblom Road in Vierlanden, Durbanville, which makes it the smallest reserve in the City’s northern network. It is best understood as a piece of protected habitat rather than a visitor facility. There is no gate operation, no visitor centre and no published opening hours, and the City runs […]

Bracken Nature Reserve

Bracken Nature Reserve is 36 hectares on the hill above Brackenfell, and most of it is vegetation the Cape has very little of left. The reserve protects critically endangered Swartland granite renosterveld and Cape Flats sand fynbos, two types the City describes as generally poorly conserved. What makes Bracken worth understanding is not that the […]

Bothasig Fynbos Nature Reserve

Bothasig Fynbos Nature Reserve is ten hectares of indigenous vegetation surrounded by houses. It sits on the border of Visserhof, Bosmansdam and Potsdam roads in Bothasig, and its significance has nothing to do with size or scenery. It is a surviving piece of the lowland fynbos that once covered this part of Cape Town, left […]

Table Bay Nature Reserve

Table Bay Nature Reserve is not one place. It is 880 hectares of wetland, river, lagoon, beach and lowland vegetation stitched together across the northern side of Cape Town, made up of seven separate parts: Rietvlei Wetlands, Milnerton Lagoon, Milnerton Beach, Milnerton Racecourse, Zoarvlei Wetlands, the Diep River and the Parklands Fynbos Corridor. Understanding that […]

Zandvlei Estuary Nature Reserve

Zandvlei is the reserve you go to rather than the one you look at. It covers about 200 hectares of vlei, estuary and surrounding wetland behind Muizenberg, and its defining feature is water you can actually use. The Zandvlei estuary is the link between this inland sheet of water and False Bay, and the reserve […]

Durbanville Nature Reserve

Durbanville Nature Reserve is small enough to walk in an hour and important enough to have been protected on purpose. It covers six hectares on Racecourse Road in Durbanville, on the edge of a suburb that grew up around it, and it holds the meeting point of two critically endangered vegetation types: Swartland Shale Renosterveld […]

Edith Stephens Nature Reserve

Edith Stephens Nature Reserve is small, urban and easy to underestimate. It covers 39 hectares beside Govan Mbeki Road in Philippi, and it exists for one specific reason. In 1955 the botanist Edith Stephens donated land here to protect Isoetes capensis, a quillwort the City describes as occurring nowhere else in the world. The City […]

Wolfgat Nature Reserve

Wolfgat is not a beach and it is not a hiking destination. It is 262 hectares of limestone cliff, dune and coastal scrub held between Mnandi and Monwabisi on the False Bay shore at Mitchells Plain, proclaimed in 1986 to protect one of the last undeveloped stretches of this coastline. The City describes the views […]

Witzands Aquifer Nature Reserve

Witzands Aquifer Nature Reserve is the reason taps run in Atlantis, Mamre and Pella. Beneath roughly 3 000 hectares of dune and fynbos on Cape Town’s northern edge sits a large natural aquifer that supplies those communities with potable water, and the reserve above it exists to keep both the supply and the landscape intact. […]

Blaauwberg Nature Reserve

Bloubergstrand is where people go for the postcard photograph of Table Mountain. Blaauwberg Nature Reserve is the 1 445 hectares behind and above it, and the reason the view still has something wild in the foreground. The City of Cape Town describes it as one of the most intact and diverse lowland vegetation habitats in […]