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 […]

False Bay Nature Reserve

Most Cape Town reserves are a place you drive to. False Bay Nature Reserve is a system you move through. The City of Cape Town manages six separate parts as one reserve along the northern shore of False Bay, and the whole of it forms part of the greater False Bay Ecology Park. Where the […]

Harmony Flats Nature Reserve

Harmony Flats is the smallest reserve in the City of Cape Town network, nine hectares of flat ground wedged between Strand and Gordon’s Bay. It has no summit, no forest and no view worth the name. It is on this site because of what grows in it, and by that measure it is one of […]

Tygerberg Nature Reserve

Cape Town’s northern suburbs have few large green spaces, and Tygerberg is the biggest of them. Where Intaka Island protects a constructed wetland inside Century City, Tygerberg conserves a whole hillside of the region’s original vegetation, and the top of that hill offers a view that takes in the entire city at once. Proclaimed as […]

Rondevlei Nature Reserve

Unlike Intaka Island’s constructed urban wetland, Rondevlei is a large natural freshwater reserve where visitors experience expansive reed beds, open water and indigenous wildlife in a much wilder setting. It is also the only place in the south-western Cape where hippopotamuses are still found. Rondevlei is one of six sections of the False Bay Nature […]

Intaka Island

Unlike Cape Town’s mountain parks and coastal reserves, Intaka Island focuses on wetlands, birdlife and environmental education. Its level walking trails and tranquil setting make it equally enjoyable for families, photographers, birdwatchers and anyone seeking a quieter nature experience. Intaka Island was created as part of the Century City development to conserve and rehabilitate an […]

Oudekraal Nature Reserve

Oudekraal protects one of the Atlantic Seaboard’s most attractive natural coastal environments. Smooth granite boulders divide the shoreline into a series of small sheltered coves with sandy pockets between them, while dense kelp forests offshore support abalone, sea urchins and shoals of fish. The reserve also preserves a section of coastal fynbos, including ericas and […]

Green Point Urban Park

Opened in 2011, Green Point Urban Park transformed a former public open space into one of Cape Town’s premier urban parks. Unlike a traditional botanical garden or nature reserve, it was designed as a modern urban green space where recreation and conservation exist side by side. Ecological principles shaped the layout, which incorporates indigenous landscaping, […]