Cape Town

The bay under Table Mountain was used by Khoekhoe herders and by passing European ships for water long before there was a town. In April 1652 Jan van Riebeeck landed with a party from the Dutch East India Company to build a fort and grow vegetables for fleets sailing between Europe and Asia. The station became a colony within a decade: free burghers were given farms, the Khoekhoe were pushed off their grazing and devastated by smallpox, and the Company imported enslaved people from the Indonesian archipelago, India, Madagascar and East Africa, whose descendants shaped the city's language, religion and food.

Britain seized the Cape in 1795, returned it, and took it permanently in 1806. Slavery ended in the 1830s. Cape Town grew as a port and as the seat of the Cape Colony's government, and when the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 it became the country's legislative capital, which it remains: Parliament still sits in the City Bowl.

Apartheid reshaped the city physically. The Group Areas Act sorted neighbourhoods by race, and in 1966 the mixed inner-city district of District Six was declared white, its residents removed to the Cape Flats from 1968 and their houses demolished; much of the ground stayed empty for decades. Robben Island, in the bay, held political prisoners from the 1960s until 1991, among them Nelson Mandela. On 11 February 1990, hours after his release, Mandela spoke to a vast crowd from the balcony of the City Hall. Since 1994 the city has grown fast through migration, tourism and a service economy, while the divisions drawn under apartheid remain written into its map.

Cape Town's culture is layered in a way that is distinct within South Africa. The largest population group is classed as coloured in the country's census categories — people of mixed Khoekhoe, European, Southeast Asian and African descent — and Cape Afrikaans, full of Malay, Portuguese and Khoekhoe words, is heard everywhere alongside isiXhosa and English. Islam has been practised at the Cape since the 17th century, and some of the country's oldest mosques stand in the Bo-Kaap.

The year opens with the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival, the Kaapse Klopse, when troupes in satin suits parade with banjos and drums on 2 January, a tradition traced to the single holiday enslaved people were given. Cape jazz, shaped by musicians such as Abdullah Ibrahim, mixes carnival rhythms with American jazz, and the city has long been a centre for theatre, literature and design; it was named World Design Capital in 2014. Public art, galleries and studios cluster in Woodstock and around the Waterfront.

Outdoor life is close to an identity. People hike Lion's Head before work, swim in cold tidal pools, run the promenade and fill the mountain paths at weekends. Cricket at Newlands and rugby at Cape Town Stadium, the Stormers' home since 2021, draw large crowds, and the Cape Town Cycle Tour closes the peninsula's roads each March. Manners are informal and greetings matter; photographing homes, residents or township streets without asking is resented, as is treating poverty as scenery.

About 4.8 million people lived in the City of Cape Town at the 2022 census, spread from the City Bowl across the Cape Flats to the northern suburbs. The economy rests on finance, insurance and business services, the port and shipping, tourism, film and advertising production, agriculture and wine in the surrounding valleys, and a technology and start-up sector that has made the city a national tech hub.

The city's geography and its apartheid planning still divide daily life. Wealthier households live along the mountain and the Atlantic coast and in the southern suburbs; the majority live on the sandy Cape Flats to the east, in areas such as Mitchells Plain and the large township of Khayelitsha, and commute long distances by minibus taxi, train and bus into the centre. Gang violence on parts of the Flats is the most pressing local issue, alongside unemployment and a shortage of affordable housing near work.

Days start early, with traffic heavy on the N1 and N2 by six in the morning and the mountain paths busy before it. Rotating power cuts, known nationally as load-shedding, structured routines for years and eased markedly in 2024 and 2025, though generators and battery systems remain common in shops and restaurants. Water is a standing worry since the drought of 2018, when the city came close to shutting off its supply; saving water is now a normal household habit and visitors are asked to keep showers short.

Cape Malay cooking is the city's signature: bobotie, spiced minced meat baked under an egg custard and eaten with yellow rice, raisins and chutney; bredie, a slow mutton stew made with tomato or with waterblommetjies, the flowers of a pond plant; mild, fruity curries with roti; samoosas; and koesisters, spiced and coconut-dusted, distinct from the plaited syrupy Afrikaner koeksister. The dishes were developed by enslaved and exiled people from the East Indies and are still cooked at home in the Bo-Kaap and across the Cape Flats.

From the cold Atlantic come snoek, braaied with apricot jam or smoked and eaten with sweet potato, along with hake, yellowtail, west coast mussels and rock lobster. The city's own street food is the gatsby, a long roll packed with chips, sauce and masala steak, polony or calamari, cut into portions for several people. Braai — grilling over wood — cuts across every community, with boerewors sausage, lamb chops, sosaties and pap.

Bree Street and the blocks around it hold much of the centre's restaurant scene, Woodstock's converted warehouses fill with weekend food markets, and the harbours at Kalk Bay and Hout Bay sell fish straight off the boats. Wine is everywhere: the old Constantia estates inside the city limits make some of the Cape's best whites, and the Stellenbosch and Franschhoek valleys are an hour away. Rooibos, the caffeine-free red bush tea of the Cederberg, is drunk plain or as an espresso-style red cappuccino.