Victoria Road Atlantic Seaboard Drive

Victoria Road is the coastal road that runs south from Camps Bay to Hout Bay with the Atlantic on one side and the western wall of Table Mountain on the other. It is worth saying plainly that there is nothing hidden or undiscovered about it. Thousands of people use it every day for the commute […]

Noon Gun

At midday in Cape Town, a cannon goes off. If you are down in the city it arrives as a flat, heavy thump that rolls off the mountain and sets a few car alarms going, and half the people around you glance at their watches without breaking stride. The gun doing it sits at the […]

Twelve Apostles

The Twelve Apostles are the chain of rock peaks and buttresses that form the western wall of Table Mountain, rising above the Atlantic Seaboard between Camps Bay and Hout Bay. They are one of Cape Town’s defining landscapes, and it is worth being clear about what visiting them means, because there is no single Twelve […]

Kloof Corner

Kloof Corner is a viewpoint on the lower slopes of Table Mountain, reached on foot from Tafelberg Road just above Kloof Nek. It sits at the shoulder where the mountain turns from the city side towards the Atlantic, high enough to open up a genuine panorama but a long way below the summit. That position […]

Steenbras Nature Reserve

Steenbras Nature Reserve covers roughly 8 400 hectares of mountain country in the Hottentots Holland range above Gordon’s Bay, reached off Faure Marine Drive, the R44 coastal road, about 9 km from the town. This is a different order of place from the small urban reserves scattered across Cape Town’s suburbs. It is a working […]

Uitkamp Wetland Nature Reserve

Uitkamp Wetland Nature Reserve protects 32 hectares of seasonal wetland and surrounding lowland veld on Mosselbank Road, on the northern edge of Durbanville. It is a small reserve in a part of Cape Town that has been built over quickly, and the reason it exists has less to do with scenery than with what would […]

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 […]

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 […]