Tana Baru Cemetery
Tana Baru lies on the eastern slopes of Signal Hill, where the Bo-Kaap street grid runs out and the hillside takes over. It is reached at the top of Longmarket Street, and it is a fenced and gated precinct rather than open ground. The Tana Baru Trust describes it as the first officially recognised Muslim […]
Palm Tree Mosque
Palm Tree Mosque sits on the eastern side of Long Street, a green-painted double-storey building wedged between a brick warehouse and a blue apartment block, with a single tall palm growing out of the pavement in front of it. A small green sign above the door carries its name. Nothing about it announces itself as […]
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 […]
Greenmarket Square
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 […]
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 […]