Cape Town & the Western Cape

San hunter-gatherers lived in the south-west for many thousands of years, and the caves along the southern coast, among them Blombos near Still Bay, hold some of the earliest evidence of symbolic human behaviour. By the time Europeans arrived, Khoekhoe herders grazed cattle and sheep around Table Bay. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape in 1488, and in 1652 Jan van Riebeeck set up a supply station for the Dutch East India Company below Table Mountain.

The station became a colony. Free burghers took land from the Khoekhoe, who were pushed out in wars and devastated by smallpox, and the colony imported enslaved people from the Indonesian archipelago, India, Madagascar and East Africa. French Huguenot refugees settled Franschhoek from 1688, and Stellenbosch, founded in 1679, became the second European town. Britain took the Cape in 1795 and again, permanently, in 1806; slavery ended in the 1830s.

Cape Town grew as a port and the seat of the Cape Colony's government, and under the Union of 1910 it became the country's legislative capital, which it remains. Apartheid hit the Western Cape in its own way: coloured residents, the region's largest group, lost the vote and were forcibly removed from District Six from 1968, the district bulldozed and moved out to the Cape Flats, while Robben Island held political prisoners from the 1960s to 1991. Mandela gave his first speech as a free man from Cape Town's City Hall in 1990. Since 2009 the province has been governed by the Democratic Alliance.

Afrikaans is the most widely spoken first language in the Western Cape, ahead of isiXhosa and English. The Cape's version of the language, full of words from Malay, Portuguese and Khoekhoe, is an everyday badge of identity, and isiXhosa is the main language in Cape Town's townships and among migrants from the Eastern Cape. English dominates the southern suburbs and the tourist economy.

The Cape Malay community, descended largely from enslaved and exiled people from the East Indies, gave Cape Town its old mosques, its cooking and the brightly painted houses of the Bo-Kaap. Islam has been practised here since the 17th century. The New Year is marked by the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival, the Kaapse Klopse, when troupes in satin suits parade through the city with banjos and drums, a tradition rooted in the slave holiday of the 2nd of January.

Cape Dutch architecture, with its whitewashed walls, thatch and curved gables, defines the older wine farms and towns. Cape jazz, shaped by Abdullah Ibrahim, mixes carnival rhythms with American jazz. Rugby and cricket at Newlands have long drawn big crowds, and the Cape Town Cycle Tour round the peninsula is one of the largest timed cycle races in the world.

About 7.4 million people live in the Western Cape, around two-thirds of them in metropolitan Cape Town. The next largest towns are far smaller: George on the Garden Route, Paarl, Worcester and Stellenbosch, a university town of about 175,000 in the wider municipality. The province has grown fast on migration from the Eastern Cape and elsewhere, and the pressure shows in the sprawling informal settlements along the N2.

The economy rests on finance and services in Cape Town, the port, tourism, film production and a large technology start-up scene, alongside farming: wine, deciduous fruit, citrus from the Olifants River valley and wheat on the Swartland. Farmworker wages and land ownership remain contested issues.

Cape Town's rhythm is set by its geography. Commuters drive in from the northern suburbs and the Cape Flats on congested highways, while the mountain and the beaches fill with hikers and swimmers before and after work. The city's inequality is stark, with Camps Bay and Khayelitsha a short drive apart. Water is a recurring worry since the 2018 drought, when the city came close to shutting off its taps, and gang violence on the Cape Flats is the most pressing local issue.

Cape Malay cooking is the region's signature: bobotie, spiced minced meat baked under an egg custard and served with yellow rice and chutney; bredie, a slow-cooked mutton stew, most famously with tomato or waterblommetjies, the flowers of a pond plant; and mild, fruity curries eaten with roti. Samoosas and koesisters, a spiced, coconut-dusted doughnut distinct from the plaited, syrupy Afrikaner koeksister, are the classic Sunday morning treats in the Bo-Kaap.

The Atlantic gives snoek, a firm fish eaten braaied or smoked, while the Gatsby, a large roll crammed with chips, meat and sauce, is Cape Town's own street food.

Wine is the centrepiece. The Cape has made wine since the 17th century, and Constantia's sweet dessert wine was prized in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Stellenbosch is known for red blends and Cabernet Sauvignon, and Franschhoek for its restaurants and Huguenot winemaking heritage. Pinotage, a grape bred at Stellenbosch University in 1924, is the Cape's own variety, and rooibos tea comes from the Cederberg.

Cape Town's sights begin with Table Mountain, reached by a rotating cable car or by hiking trails, with Lion's Head and Signal Hill beside it. Below lie the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, the ferry to Robben Island, the colourful Bo-Kaap, the District Six Museum, the Castle of Good Hope and the Company's Garden. Kirstenbosch botanical garden, on the mountain's eastern slopes, grows the fynbos flora of the Cape.

The Cape Peninsula runs south through the beaches of Clifton and Camps Bay, the cliff road of Chapman's Peak and the fishing harbour of Kalk Bay to the African penguin colony at Boulders Beach near Simon's Town. At its tip the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point sit within Table Mountain National Park.

Inland, the Cape Winelands centre on Stellenbosch, with its oak-lined streets and old Dutch houses, and Franschhoek, reached over the Helshoogte Pass, with Paarl and Tulbagh further north. East along the coast, Hermanus is the base for whale-watching on Walker Bay, and Cape Agulhas marks the southernmost point of Africa.

The Garden Route runs from Mossel Bay through Wilderness, Knysna with its lagoon and forests, and Plettenberg Bay, with the forests and lakes of the Garden Route National Park along the way. Inland are Oudtshoorn's ostrich farms and the Cango Caves, the Karoo, and the Cederberg's sandstone formations and rock art.