Cape Town Highlights
A curated tour of Cape Town's iconic peaks, beaches, history, and wildlife.
Trip Stops
- 1
South Africa's oldest surviving colonial building, this pentagonal Dutch fort was built between 1666 and 1679. It originally sat right on the Table Bay shoreline until land reclamation pushed the sea nearly a kilometer away.
📍 Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- 2
A memorial to the 60,000 residents forcibly removed from this vibrant, mixed-race inner-city neighborhood under apartheid in the 1970s. The museum floor is covered by a giant map of the old district, hand-annotated by former residents marking exactly where their homes once stood.
📍 Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- 3
A historic Cape Malay quarter on the slopes of Signal Hill, famous for its cobblestone streets lined with brightly painted 18th-century houses. Legend holds the houses were once all white, and were painted rainbow colors by freed slaves to celebrate their emancipation.
📍 Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- 4
The flat-topped sandstone icon towering over Cape Town, so ancient it predates the Atlantic Ocean itself. A rotating cable car has carried visitors to its 1,085-meter summit since 1929, though the mountain is also famous for the fast-moving cloud that spills over its edge, nicknamed the 'tablecloth.'
📍 Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- 5
A conical peak between Table Mountain and Signal Hill, prized for a hiking trail with chains and ladders near the top. Its full-moon night hikes are a beloved local ritual, and Dutch settlers once called it 'Leeuwen Kop' for its resemblance to a crouching lion.
📍 Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- 6
Nestled at the eastern foot of Table Mountain, this was the first botanical garden in the world founded specifically to preserve a nation's indigenous flora, back in 1913. It showcases over 7,000 plant species from the Cape Floristic Region and features the treetop Boomslang canopy walkway.
📍 Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- 7
A bustling harborfront district built around the oldest working harbor in the Southern Hemisphere, mixing shopping, dining, and a marina beneath Table Mountain. It's Cape Town's single most-visited attraction and home to the Zeitz MOCAA, the largest museum of contemporary African art in the world.
📍 Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- 8
A small island in Table Bay where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 of his 27 years behind bars, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site reachable by ferry from the Waterfront. Its Afrikaans name, Robbeneiland, literally means 'Seal Island,' after the animals that once crowded its shores.
📍 Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- 9
A glamorous Atlantic Seaboard beach suburb with a wide white-sand beach backed by the dramatic Twelve Apostles mountain range. Its palm-lined Victoria Road promenade is packed with beach bars and restaurants that fill up for sunset.
📍 Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- 10
One of the world's most scenic coastal roads, a 9-kilometer route carved into the near-vertical cliff face between Hout Bay and Noordhoek. Engineers blasted 114 curves into the mountainside to complete the drive in 1922, and it remains a toll road to this day.
📍 Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- 11
A sheltered beach of granite boulders near Simon's Town, home to a colony of African penguins that started with just two breeding pairs in 1982. Boardwalks let visitors get remarkably close to the birds without disturbing their nests.
📍 Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
- 12
The rugged, windswept promontory at the southwestern tip of the Cape Peninsula, long mythologized as the meeting point of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans (a title that technically belongs to Cape Agulhas further east). Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias first rounded it in 1488, originally naming it the 'Cape of Storms.'
📍 Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
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