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 […]
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 […]