Llandudno Beach

Llandudno Beach is a single curve of pale sand at the head of a granite cove on the Atlantic coast, wedged between Camps Bay and Hout Bay. Enormous rounded boulders form both ends of the bay and spill onto the sand itself, the slopes climb steeply on three sides, and the ocean fills the fourth. […]

Camps Bay Beach

Camps Bay Beach is one long, open sweep of pale sand on Cape Town’s Atlantic coast, and it is the city’s most easily reached big beach. Where Clifton hides four small coves behind granite, Camps Bay gives you the opposite: a single broad shoreline with nothing between you and the ocean, and a busy urban […]

Clifton Beaches

Clifton is not one beach but four, set side by side in a line of sheltered coves below the mountain on Cape Town’s Atlantic coast. They are known simply as 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Beach, and each is a separate crescent of very white sand divided from its neighbours by outcrops of pale granite. […]

Gordon’s Bay Harbour

Gordon’s Bay Harbour sits in the eastern corner of False Bay, sheltered behind a curving breakwater with the mountains rising almost directly behind it. It is a small, quiet harbour by comparison with Cape Town’s better-known waterfronts: mostly yachts, small motorboats and leisure craft on their moorings rather than fishing fleets or naval vessels. The […]

Simon’s Town Harbour

Simon’s Town Harbour is the maritime waterfront of a town that exists because of it. The harbour sits in a sheltered corner of False Bay, tucked under steep mountains on the eastern side of the Cape Peninsula, and it has been in continuous naval and maritime use for a very long time. That is what […]

Kalk Bay Harbour

Kalk Bay Harbour is a small working fishing harbour set directly into the middle of Kalk Bay village on the False Bay coast. What defines it is the scale. There is no precinct to navigate and no distance between the harbour and everything around it: you turn off the main road, walk through a gap, […]

Hout Bay Harbour

Hout Bay Harbour is Cape Town’s busiest working fishing harbour, tucked into the western corner of Hout Bay beneath the blunt rock face of the Sentinel. It is worth setting expectations properly: this is not a redeveloped waterfront. Boats are unloaded here, gear is repaired here, and people work here. Visitors are welcome and there […]

Ou Kaapse Weg

Ou Kaapse Weg, the Old Cape Road, is the mountain crossing that links Cape Town’s southern suburbs with the southern peninsula. It is not a coastal road and it is not a lookout you drive to. It is a pass, and the reason to take it is the crossing itself. You leave the suburbs behind […]

Boyes Drive

Boyes Drive is the road that runs along the mountainside above Muizenberg, St James and Kalk Bay, a good way up from the coastal road most people use. It exists largely as a local alternative to the Main Road below, and there is nothing remarkable about the road itself: two lanes, houses along one side […]

Clarence Drive

Clarence Drive is the stretch of the R44 that leaves Gordon’s Bay and runs south along the eastern edge of False Bay, held between mountain slopes on one side and open water on the other. It is a public road rather than a built attraction, but it is one of the few roads in the […]