The Best Markets in Cape Town

Time Out Market Cape Town is a chef-led food hall where a rotating selection of the city’s most respected kitchens cook side by side. Every vendor is chosen by Time Out’s editors rather than simply renting a stall, so the line-up reflects genuine critical judgement about where the city is eating well.

That carefully curated mix is what makes Time Out different. Instead of committing to a single restaurant for the evening, you’re choosing from a shortlist that Time Out’s food editors have already selected for quality and variety.

Open from late morning until late evening, Time Out Market fits naturally into almost any Waterfront visit. Whether you’re stopping for lunch, meeting friends after work or looking for dinner before an evening on the harbour, free entry makes it easy to drop in without planning your day around it.

Mojo Market is a vibrant indoor food and lifestyle market in the heart of Sea Point, just steps from the famous beachfront promenade. It brings together international street food, local favourites, craft drinks, live music and a relaxed social atmosphere under one roof.

Unlike traditional weekend markets, Mojo Market stays open late into the evening, making it as popular for dinner and drinks as it is for a casual daytime visit. Whether you’re stopping for coffee after a walk along the promenade or meeting friends for live music and dinner, the market offers something throughout the day.

Open every day with free entry, Mojo Market is one of the easiest places in Cape Town to enjoy different cuisines in a single visit. Its central Sea Point location also makes it easy to combine with the promenade, Green Point Park, the V&A Waterfront or a sunset along the Atlantic coast.

How to Get There

Mojo Market is located on Regent Road in Sea Point, just a short walk from the Sea Point Promenade. It is easy to reach by car, ride-hailing services and the MyCiTi bus network, making it one of Cape Town’s most accessible food markets.

Paid parking is available in the surrounding streets and nearby public parking areas, although spaces become busier during evenings and weekends.

Set inside a converted warehouse at the V&A Waterfront, the Watershed is Cape Town’s leading destination for South African design, craftsmanship and locally made products. Since opening in 2014, it has grown into the largest curated design market on the continent, bringing together more than 150 makers and over 360 local brands beneath one roof.

Unlike a traditional shopping centre, the Watershed focuses on independent creators and small businesses, giving visitors the opportunity to discover authentic South African design while meeting many of the people behind the products. Its central location beside the Two Oceans Aquarium also makes it an easy stop during a day exploring the V&A Waterfront.

Open every day with free entry, the Watershed is ideal for anyone looking for unique gifts, locally made souvenirs or simply an enjoyable hour of browsing. Weekday mornings are generally quieter, while weekends offer a livelier atmosphere as both locals and visitors explore the Waterfront.

Greenmarket Square sits in the middle of Cape Town’s city centre, a cobbled open space bounded by Longmarket and Shortmarket streets with Burg Street running straight through the middle of it. It is generally described as the city’s second-oldest public square after the Grand Parade, and the ground in front of the Old Town House door is treated as the historical centre of Cape Town. What makes it worth walking to is not any single building but the fact that this one block has been in continuous use, in one form or another, for more than three hundred years.

The square was never designed. It formed. The Dutch East India Company’s garden, a few hundred metres up the hill, was planted to supply passing ships, and produce from it was brought down to this open ground to be sold to the townspeople. Farmers and freed slaves from the surrounding district followed with wagons and carts, and the space settled into its role as the town’s fresh-produce market. That is where the name comes from. In 1696 a burgher watch house was built here, giving Cape Town’s civilian militia a base from which to patrol the streets at night, and from that point the square was both the commercial and the administrative centre of the settlement.

Enslaved people were part of everything that happened on and around the square. They carried the produce, worked the surrounding households and made up much of the labour of the early town, and Greenmarket Square is commonly named among the places in the old central city where enslaved people were bought and sold. That history is set out properly at the Slave Lodge, a few minutes’ walk down Adderley Street.

In 1755 the watch house was replaced by a larger building on the same site: the Cape rococo structure now known as the Old Town House. It housed the burgher council, then served as Cape Town’s town hall for much of the nineteenth century, which meant that for decades the square was simultaneously the town’s marketplace and the seat of its local government. The buildings around it kept pace with the town. Thatched single-storey dwellings gave way to flat-roofed houses of two and three storeys through the eighteenth century, and by about 1840 almost nothing single-storey survived on the square.

Greenmarket Square lost its central role in 1905, when the new Cape Town City Hall opened beside the Grand Parade and both the civic administration and much of the trading moved with it. What followed was commercial rather than civic. Through the 1930s a run of Art Deco office buildings went up around the square, including Market House, Namaqua House and, on the southern corner, Newspaper House, completed in 1936 as the home of the Cape Times and the Cape Argus. The result is the mix a visitor sees now: an eighteenth-century town house, a large Victorian Gothic church and a set of confident 1930s office blocks facing each other across the same cobbles.

Its lowest point came in the 1950s, when the square was turned into a car park. The granite setts that surface it today were laid in the 1960s, using stone lifted from streets being upgraded elsewhere in the city and dressed by hand. The square and the buildings around it were declared a national monument on 17 February 1961. During the 1980s traders began putting up stalls on the parking area, at first only a couple of days a week and then daily, and market trading returned to a square that had lost it eighty years earlier. The same decade gave the square its best-known moment in modern politics: on 2 September 1989, days before South Africa’s racially segregated parliamentary elections, a police water cannon loaded with purple dye was turned on thousands of anti-apartheid demonstrators here. A protester climbed onto the vehicle and redirected the jet, and the office blocks around the square were left stained purple several storeys high. It is remembered as the Purple Rain protest.

The square’s role as a place where the city’s tensions become visible did not end with apartheid. From October 2019 several hundred refugees and asylum seekers occupied Greenmarket Square and the Central Methodist Mission beside it, demanding resettlement outside South Africa after a period of xenophobic violence in the country. The occupation lasted almost six months and ended in early April 2020, when those still on the square were relocated by the authorities.

Trading on the square today is craft and curio rather than produce. Stalls carry wood and soapstone carvings, beadwork, wire art, printed and woven fabric, paintings, jewellery, leather sandals, drums and masks, and a great deal of the stock comes from elsewhere on the continent rather than from Cape Town, which has made this one of the more visibly pan-African spaces in the city centre. Trading is regulated by the City of Cape Town, which allocates bays under an approved trading plan, and a revised plan covering the square and the surrounding central-city trading areas was adopted in 2026. The important thing for a visitor to understand is that the market and the square are not the same thing. The square is permanent. The number of stalls, the mix of goods and the intensity of trading all change, and on a wet winter weekday the square can be close to empty.

The square is smaller than photographs of it suggest, a shallow rectangle of cobbles with a scatter of mature trees, split by Burg Street, and enclosed tightly enough that Table Mountain appears above the rooflines rather than across open ground. Under the trees the stalls stand in rows with narrow lanes between them, and around the edges cafes and restaurants put tables out onto the cobbles. Traders will approach you and bargaining is normal; this is a working market rather than a display. It is also a busy central-city square, so the ordinary city-centre care applies: bags closed and in front of you, valuables out of sight. The cobbles are uneven and hard going for prams and wheelchairs.

The one building on the square you can go into as a visitor is the Old Town House, the white rococo building with the small belfry, which now holds the Michaelis Collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings and keeps its own hours and admission charges. On the Burg Street corner stands the Central Methodist Mission, built as the Metropolitan Methodist Church between 1876 and 1879 and still an active congregation with a long record of social and political involvement in the city. Greenmarket Square works best as one stop on a walk rather than a destination on its own: St George’s Mall runs off one corner, Long Street is a block away, and Adderley Street, the Slave Lodge, St George’s Cathedral, Groote Kerk and the Company’s Garden are all within about five minutes on foot.

Few places have shaped Cape Town’s Saturday morning culture quite like the Old Biscuit Mill. Neighbourgoods Market opened inside the converted Woodstock mill and turned a working industrial yard into a weekend habit that much of the city still keeps.

What sets it apart from the other weekend markets is the neighbourhood around it. Woodstock is Cape Town’s creative quarter, a run of galleries, design studios and workshops along Albert Road, and the market sits inside that world rather than beside it. Plenty of visits carry on into the surrounding streets long after the last coffee.

It trades across the full weekend, and the two days are not the same market. Saturday is the busy one, shoulder to shoulder by mid-morning and best reached early. Sunday is shorter and considerably calmer, which makes it the better choice if you would rather browse than queue.

How to Get There

The Old Biscuit Mill sits on Albert Road in Woodstock, a short drive from the city centre. Parking is the main thing to plan for. Street parking runs along Albert Road and the side streets either side of the Mill, but it fills quickly on Saturdays. There is limited paid parking at the College of Cape Town across the road, charged at around R20 for the day.

MyCiTi route 261 stops at the Old Biscuit Mill, and route 102 stops about 100m away in Salt River Road. Albert Road has a dedicated cycle lane running past the market, and there are bicycle racks on site.

The Oranjezicht City Farm Market, known locally as the OZCF Market, began as a community urban-farming project and has grown into one of the city’s defining weekend rituals. Today the market takes place at Granger Bay, with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and Table Mountain rising behind it.

What separates it from a general food market is that traceability is the entire point. Growers and producers sell what they have grown or made themselves, so a conversation with the person behind the table is part of the visit rather than a bonus.

It runs on Saturday and Sunday mornings through to early afternoon, with a separate Wednesday evening session for most of the year. Entry is free and the setting is entirely outdoors, which makes it a natural start to a weekend day rather than something to build one around.

Located inside the historic Hout Bay Harbour, Bay Harbour Market is one of Cape Town’s most popular indoor attractions, bringing together local food, artisan shopping and live entertainment beneath one roof. Housed inside a converted fish factory, the market combines the character of a working harbour with a lively atmosphere that attracts both locals and visitors throughout the year.

Whether you’re stopping for lunch, looking for unique South African gifts or simply enjoying live music with a view of the harbour, the market offers an easy way to experience several sides of Cape Town in a single visit. Its indoor setting also makes it an excellent choice during colder, windy or rainy weather.

Combined with nearby attractions such as Hout Bay Beach, Chapman’s Peak Drive and Seal Island boat trips, Bay Harbour Market is an easy addition to any day exploring the Hout Bay area.