Travel and Tourism in South Africa

Cape Town: City of Mountains, Oceans, and Memory

Cape Town is regularly rated among the most beautiful cities in the world, and it earns every superlative. The city occupies a narrow peninsula beneath the extraordinary flat-topped form of Table Mountain, whose distinctive profile has served as a navigational landmark for sailors for centuries and whose summit offers one of the most dramatic views of any city from any vantage point on earth. The mountain, the ocean, the Cape Dutch architecture, the extraordinary cultural mix, the cuisine, the wine, and the nearby wildlife all combine to create a city of almost overwhelming richness.

Table Mountain is the defining feature of Cape Town and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of the Cape Floristic Region. The mountain's summit plateau sits at approximately 1,086 meters and is covered in fynbos, including more than 1,400 plant species. The summit is accessible by the revolving cable car from the lower cable station on Tafelberg Road, a journey of approximately five minutes that offers vertiginous views as the city drops away below. The cable car operates weather permitting, and Table Mountain's summit is frequently shrouded in the famous tablecloth of cloud, a white orographic cloud that spills over the mountain's edge when the southeasterly wind blows. Hiking to the summit is also possible on several routes, including the Platteklip Gorge route, a well-marked path that ascends the front of the mountain in roughly ninety minutes, and the India Venster route, a longer and more scenic trail on the western side. Both routes offer close encounters with the fynbos vegetation and its extraordinary flowers.

The Cape Peninsula extends south from Cape Town for roughly 75 kilometers, a narrow finger of mountains and coastline flanked on the west by the cold Atlantic and on the east by the warmer waters of False Bay. The Cape Point National Park protects the southern end of the peninsula and contains some of its most dramatic scenery. The Cape of Good Hope, technically not the southernmost point of Africa (that is Cape Agulhas, 170 kilometers to the east) but the most psychologically significant landmark, sits within the park. The scenery at Cape Point is spectacular: vertical cliffs drop hundreds of meters to churning seas, and the wind often howls with extraordinary force. The park is home to a remarkable array of wildlife including Cape mountain zebra, eland, baboons, ostriches, and more than 250 bird species.

At Boulders Beach near the town of Simon's Town on the eastern side of the peninsula, a colony of African penguins has established itself in the suburban environment, sharing the beach with bathers in a remarkable and charming coexistence. The African penguin, also known as the jackass penguin for its donkey-like bray, is an endangered species whose global population has declined by more than ninety percent in the past century. The Boulders colony, established naturally in 1982, has grown to approximately 2,000 birds and is one of the most accessible penguin viewing experiences in the world.

Robben Island, visible from Cape Town's waterfront about twelve kilometers offshore in Table Bay, is one of the most significant sites of the twentieth century and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. For much of the twentieth century it served as a high-security prison for political prisoners of the apartheid regime, including Nelson Mandela, who spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years of imprisonment there. Today it operates as a museum, and visitors take a ferry from the V&A Waterfront to the island, where they are guided by former political prisoners who were themselves incarcerated there. Seeing Mandela's cell, a tiny concrete room, and hearing from guides who lived through the imprisonment is an experience of extraordinary power.

The Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, usually called the V&A Waterfront, is Cape Town's most visited destination and one of the most successful urban waterfront developments in the world. Built around a working harbor that dates to the 1860s, it combines hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, museums, and entertainment venues in a setting where fishing boats, ferries, and luxury yachts share the water. The Two Oceans Aquarium is one of the best in Africa. The Cape Wheel offers aerial views of the harbor. The Nobel Square honors South Africa's four Nobel Peace Prize laureates: Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and F.W. de Klerk.

The Bo-Kaap neighborhood, climbing the slopes of Signal Hill above the city center, is one of Cape Town's most distinctive and photographed areas. Its streets are lined with brightly painted terrace houses in pinks, yellows, greens, and blues, a visual celebration that has become iconic. The Bo-Kaap is the historic heartland of the Cape Malay community, the Muslim descendants of enslaved workers and political exiles brought to the Cape by the VOC from across Asia and Africa. The neighborhood contains some of Cape Town's oldest mosques, including the Awwal Mosque, the oldest mosque in South Africa, built in 1794. The food of the Bo-Kaap is one of Cape Town's great pleasures: koesisters (syrup-drenched cardamom pastries), samoosas, rotis, and rich curries fragrant with cinnamon and anise. The culture of the Cape Malay community found its most public expression in the Tweede Nuwe Jaar, the Second New Year carnival held on January 2, when the Cape Minstrel Carnival, known as the Kaapse Klopse, fills the streets with thousands of performers in elaborate satin costumes, playing banjos and singing in the ghoema tradition.

The District Six Museum is one of Cape Town's most important and emotionally affecting spaces. District Six was a vibrant, multiracial inner-city neighborhood that was declared a White Group Area under the Group Areas Act in 1966 and systematically demolished, its 60,000 residents forcibly removed to the desolate Cape Flats townships far from the city center. The museum, housed in a former church, preserves the memory of the community that was destroyed, through photographs, personal belongings, street maps, and the testimonies of former residents, many of whom donated objects and participated in the museum's creation. It is a profoundly moving experience and an essential part of understanding Cape Town's history.

Long Street, running through the center of Cape Town, is the city's most famous entertainment and cultural street. Its Victorian architecture, now housing restaurants, bars, cafes, bookshops, and guesthouses, creates a lively urban canyon where backpackers mingle with office workers and where the city's nightlife concentrates on weekends. The Fugard Theatre, nearby in the Precinct of the Bo-Kaap, is one of South Africa's premier performance venues, named after the playwright Athol Fugard.

The Atlantic Seaboard, stretching south from the V&A Waterfront along the western coast of the peninsula, contains some of Cape Town's most fashionable neighborhoods and spectacular beaches. Sea Point is a dense, cosmopolitan suburb with a beautiful promenade running along the rocky coastline. Clifton, accessed through a tunnel in the mountain flank, has four small beaches sheltered from the wind by granite boulders, and its calm, clear, utterly freezing Atlantic water and its backdrop of luxury apartments make it the most fashionable beach address in the country. Camps Bay, just south of Clifton, has a broad sandy beach backed by restaurants and bars and framed by the dramatic buttresses of the Twelve Apostles section of Table Mountain. Lion's Head, the conical peak that separates Sea Point from Camps Bay, offers a famous sunset hike that is one of Cape Town's great urban outdoor experiences.

The Constantia Wine Valley, in the southern suburbs of Cape Town, contains the oldest wine estates in South Africa. Klein Constantia, Groot Constantia, and Buitenverwachting produce wines in a lush, green valley sheltered by the eastern slope of Table Mountain. The Constantia wines were famous across Europe in the eighteenth century, and Jane Austen mentioned them in Sense and Sensibility. Today the estates combine wine production with superb restaurants and beautiful gardens.

Cape Town's food scene is one of the most exciting in Africa, a complex fusion of Cape Malay, Afrikaner, English colonial, Indian, Portuguese, and contemporary global influences. The city has produced some of Africa's finest restaurants, and its casual food culture is equally rewarding. The Gatsby sandwich, a Cape Town invention stuffed with hot chips, various fillings, and sauces, cut diagonally and shared among friends, is one of the city's most beloved street foods. Seafood is exceptional, particularly the linefish and crayfish of the Cape coast.

For the adventurous, the waters around Gansbaai, roughly 170 kilometers east of Cape Town, offer the world's most accessible great white shark cage diving experience. The cold, nutrient-rich waters of the channel between Geyser Rock and Dyer Island attract substantial numbers of great white sharks, particularly in the winter months. Dyer Island itself hosts a large Cape Fur Seal colony, whose young are preyed upon by the sharks. Cage diving with great whites is a remarkable and legally regulated experience in which visitors descend in a surface-suspended cage and observe these magnificent predators at close range.

Hermanus, on Walker Bay east of Cape Town, is renowned as one of the world's great land-based whale watching destinations. Southern right whales migrate to Walker Bay from their Antarctic feeding grounds to calve and nurse their young from June through November. The town has a dedicated whale crier who announces sightings with a kelp horn, and the cliffs above the bay offer grandstand views of these extraordinary animals, which can be seen breaching, spy-hopping, and tail-slapping remarkably close to shore. The southern right whale was hunted almost to extinction and has recovered to some degree under international protection, and Walker Bay is now home to one of the most studied populations in the world.

Kruger National Park and Mpumalanga: The Heartland of Safari

Kruger National Park is the greatest wildlife reserve in South Africa and one of the most celebrated in the world. Covering approximately 19,485 square kilometers, an area roughly the size of Wales or the state of New Jersey, it stretches along the eastern border of Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces from the Limpopo River in the north to the Crocodile River in the south. Within its boundaries live an estimated 12,000 elephants, 17,000 buffalo, 2,800 lions, 1,000 leopards, and 33,000 zebra, as well as populations of both white and critically endangered black rhinoceros, cheetah, wild dog, spotted hyena, hippopotamus, Nile crocodile, and more than 500 bird species.

The Big Five concept originated in the language of big game hunters, who identified the lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo, and rhinoceros as the five most dangerous and therefore prestigious animals to hunt. In the context of modern safari the term has shifted to describe the five most sought-after wildlife sightings, though seeing all five in a single day is not unusual in Kruger during the dry season. The park is also exceptional for animals that go beyond the Big Five: the endangered African wild dog is more reliably seen in Kruger than almost anywhere else in the world. Kruger's cheetah population, while smaller than that of the Masai Mara or Serengeti, offers regular sightings in the open southern and central regions.

The best game viewing in Kruger occurs in the dry winter months of June through September, when the vegetation thins and animals concentrate around the remaining water sources. The park's network of rivers, including the Olifants, Letaba, Shingwedzi, and Luvuvhu, become the focus of wildlife activity in the dry season. Dawn and dusk are the optimal viewing times, as these are when the big cats are most active and when the quality of light is most beautiful.

Kruger is accessible to self-drive visitors via an extensive network of paved and unpaved roads connecting numerous rest camps. Skukuza, near the Numbi Gate in the south, is the park's main camp and largest facility. Berg-en-Dal, Lower Sabie, Satara, Olifants, Letaba, Mopani, and Shingwedzi are among the other major camps, each with different character and wildlife in their surrounding areas. The southern and central regions generally offer the densest lion and leopard sightings, while the northern reaches around Punda Maria and Pafuri offer more remote and exclusive experiences and different wildlife species more characteristic of the Limpopo River valley.

The private game reserves that share unfenced borders with Kruger's western boundary offer a different and more exclusive safari experience. The Sabi Sands Game Reserve, which abuts the central western boundary of Kruger, is one of the finest game viewing areas in the world and is particularly famous for its extraordinarily habituated leopards. The leopards of the Sabi Sands have been observed and studied for decades and are so comfortable with vehicles that they will walk within meters of a stationary Land Cruiser. Timbavati and Thornybush, north of Sabi Sands, offer similarly excellent game viewing with fewer visitors. The private lodges operating in these reserves, including Singita, &Beyond, Lion Sands, and Leopard Hills among many others, provide what many regard as the definitive African safari experience, combining expert guidance, luxurious accommodations, excellent cuisine, and intimate wildlife encounters.

The Mpumalanga Panorama Route, northwest of Kruger, is one of South Africa's most spectacular scenic drives. The Blyde River Canyon, at approximately 26 kilometers long and 800 meters deep, is one of the largest canyons in the world and one of the most spectacular in Africa. The canyon cuts through the Drakensberg escarpment, and its red sandstone walls are reflected in the Blyde River Dam at its northern end. The viewpoints along the canyon's rim offer vertiginous perspectives across the lowveld that stretches east toward Mozambique. God's Window, perhaps the most dramatic viewpoint on the route, looks east over the escarpment edge at the seemingly infinite forest-green lowveld far below. Bourke's Luck Potholes, at the junction of the Blyde and Treur Rivers, are a series of extraordinary cylindrical rock formations sculpted by millennia of water erosion, forming deep potholes in colorful orange and red rock. The Three Rondavels, erosion-resistant dolomite pillars that rise from the canyon floor, resemble in form the round traditional dwellings called rondavels.

Pilgrim's Rest, a gold rush town in the mountains above the escarpment, has been preserved as a living museum of the late nineteenth century gold rush that preceded the far larger Witwatersrand discovery. Its Victorian-era buildings, including the Royal Hotel, churches, and miners' cottages, give the town an air of stepping back in time.

Johannesburg and Surrounds: The City of Gold and Its Conscience

Johannesburg is not a beautiful city in the conventional sense. It was built in haste on the bones of a gold rush, and its urban form reflects the chaotic, money-driven priorities of its origins. But it is one of Africa's most dynamic, complex, and fascinating cities, a place where the contradictions of South Africa's past and present are most nakedly visible and where the creativity born of those contradictions finds its most concentrated expression.

Founded in 1886 following the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg grew from a mining camp to a city of more than 100,000 people within a decade, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in human history. Today the greater Johannesburg metropolitan area, including Ekurhuleni and Soweto, has a population of approximately six million. The city sits on the Highveld at 1,750 meters altitude, giving it a bracing climate and skies of extraordinary clarity, particularly after summer thunderstorms.

Soweto, the South Western Township southwest of central Johannesburg, is the place more than any other in South Africa where the human cost of apartheid was played out and where the resistance to it was forged. It is a vast urban area of approximately 1.3 million people that was created by apartheid planners as a residential zone for Black workers serving Johannesburg's economy. At the height of apartheid, Soweto had no hotels, no cinemas, and no facilities commensurate with its enormous population. Its streets were the site of the 1976 uprising, and its community produced many of the figures who drove the anti-apartheid struggle.

Vilakazi Street in Soweto holds the extraordinary distinction of being the only street in the world where two Nobel Peace Prize winners lived. Nelson Mandela's modest house at number 8115 Vilakazi Street, where he lived before his imprisonment, is now a museum where visitors can see the small rooms where the young lawyer and activist lived with his family. Approximately five hundred meters away is the home of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the other Nobel laureate who made Vilakazi Street his address. Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his courageous opposition to apartheid. The Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, just off Vilakazi Street, commemorates the Soweto Uprising and displays Sam Nzima's iconic photograph alongside extensive documentation of the uprising and its aftermath. It is one of the most moving museum experiences in South Africa.

The Apartheid Museum at Gold Reef City, south of central Johannesburg, is perhaps the most comprehensive and powerful museum devoted to the apartheid era. Opened in 2001, it was built as part of the conditions attached to the casino license granted to the adjacent theme park, an arrangement that says much about the pragmatic negotiation that has characterized post-apartheid South Africa. The museum traces the full arc of apartheid, from its ideological roots to its legislative implementation to the resistance movements to its eventual dismantling, through photographs, film, audio recordings, objects, and architectural spaces. Visitors enter through separate gates, labeled white and non-white, replicating the apartheid-era experience at a visceral level. It requires several hours to do justice to its content and emerges permanently altered.

Constitution Hill in Hillbrow is another site of deep historical resonance. The complex was formerly the site of the Old Fort prison, where thousands of Black men were incarcerated for pass law violations and where, in separate facilities, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were also briefly imprisoned. Today the Old Fort has been incorporated into the Constitutional Court, South Africa's highest court for constitutional matters, in a deliberate architectural statement about the transformation of a site of oppression into the guardian of democratic rights. The building itself is an extraordinary work of architecture, incorporating bricks from the demolished prison and artworks by leading South African artists. Visitors can view the court when not in session and explore the Old Fort prison buildings.

The Maboneng Precinct in the inner city east of Johannesburg is one of the most remarkable urban renewal stories in Africa. A decade ago the area was derelict and dangerous. Since 2009 it has been transformed by developer Jonathan Liebmann into a vibrant arts and culture district with galleries, studios, restaurants, apartments, and a Sunday market that is one of the city's most enjoyable social occasions. The regeneration has attracted artists, designers, entrepreneurs, and creative businesses and has demonstrated that South African cities can be reclaimed and renewed.

The Cradle of Humankind, a World Heritage Site approximately 50 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg in the Magaliesberg foothills, is one of the world's most significant paleoanthropological sites. The dolomitic caves of the area have yielded an extraordinary series of hominid fossils spanning more than three million years of human evolution. Sterkfontein Cave produced Mrs Ples in 1947, a nearly complete skull of Australopithecus africanus dated to approximately 2.3 million years. The same cave yielded Little Foot, a nearly complete Australopithecus skeleton more than three million years old. In 2013, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger and his team discovered Homo naledi, a previously unknown species of hominid in the Rising Star Cave system, a discovery that challenged existing understanding of human evolution. The Maropeng visitor center at the surface offers an excellent introduction to human evolutionary history.

Pretoria, 50 kilometers north of Johannesburg, is South Africa's executive capital, where the national government administration and most foreign embassies are based. It is a more sedate city than Johannesburg, with wide avenues and parklike suburbs. In October the city's jacaranda trees, of which there are an estimated 70,000, burst into purple bloom simultaneously, earning it the name Jacaranda City and creating a visual spectacle that attracts photographers from across the country. The Union Buildings, designed by Herbert Baker and completed in 1913, sit on a ridge overlooking the city and house the offices of the President of South Africa. The semicircular sandstone buildings are flanked by terraced gardens and contain a statue of Nelson Mandela on the lawns facing the city. The Voortrekker Monument, a massive granite structure southwest of the city, was built in 1949 to commemorate the Voortrekkers and the Battle of Blood River. It is one of the most visited monuments in South Africa and an important artifact of Afrikaner nationalist culture, its interior frieze of marble bas-reliefs telling the story of the Great Trek.

South Africa's UNESCO World Heritage Sites

South Africa has twelve UNESCO World Heritage Sites, a remarkable total that reflects the country's extraordinary natural and cultural richness.

The Fossil Hominid Sites of South Africa, which include Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Kromdraai, and environs (known collectively as the Cradle of Humankind), were inscribed in 1999. This site, northwest of Johannesburg, has yielded more hominid fossils than anywhere else in the world, with discoveries spanning more than four million years of human evolution.

Robben Island was inscribed in 1999. This site, the former maximum-security prison where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were held, represents both the dark history of apartheid and the triumph of the human spirit over oppression.

The iSimangaliso Wetland Park, on the northern KwaZulu-Natal coast, was inscribed in 1999. This extraordinary coastal wilderness encompasses lake systems, coral reefs, beaches, and forest, forming one of Africa's most biodiverse protected areas.

The Ukhahlamba-Drakensberg Park, combining the dramatic mountain scenery of the Drakensberg with the world's greatest concentration of San rock art, was inscribed in 2000.

The Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape, in Limpopo Province at the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe rivers near the borders of Zimbabwe and Botswana, was inscribed in 2003. Mapungubwe was the center of the most sophisticated kingdom in southern Africa between 1220 and 1290 CE, a state that traded gold and ivory with the East African coast and as far as China. The royal hilltop site yielded extraordinary gold artifacts, including the famous golden rhinoceros, now housed in the Mapungubwe Museum at the University of Pretoria.

The Cape Floristic Region was inscribed in 2004 as a serial World Heritage Site encompassing eight protected areas across the southwestern Cape. It is recognized as one of the world's six floral kingdoms and the most species-rich temperate flora in the world.

The Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape, in the far northwest of the Northern Cape along the Orange River, was inscribed in 2007. This arid mountain desert, home to the semi-nomadic Nama people who maintain a traditional pastoral lifestyle, contains an extraordinary diversity of succulent plants.

The Barberton Makhonjwa Mountains, in Mpumalanga, were inscribed in 2018 as a natural heritage site representing some of the oldest exposed geological formations on earth, dating back 3.2 to 3.6 billion years and providing crucial evidence for the conditions of early life on earth.

The Khomani Cultural Landscape, in the Kalahari Desert of the Northern Cape, was inscribed in 2017. It recognizes the continued connection of the Khomani San people to their ancestral land in the Kalahari, one of the last intact landscapes in South Africa where San hunter-gatherer knowledge and land use practices have survived into the modern era.

The newly inscribed Elandsfontein Fossil site was inscribed in 2023, recognizing the paleontological importance of this Western Cape site which has yielded significant hominin fossils and the remains of extinct megafauna.

Human Rights, Liberation and Reconciliation: Nelson Mandela Legacy Sites was inscribed in 2024 as a transnational serial cultural World Heritage Site. This inscription recognizes a constellation of locations directly associated with the life, incarceration, and liberation of Nelson Mandela, as well as the broader struggle against apartheid and the eventual transition to democracy. In South Africa the inscribed components include Victor Verster Prison, now known as the Drakenstein Correctional Centre near Paarl in the Western Cape, from which Mandela walked free on February 11, 1990; Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia north of Johannesburg, where ANC and South African Communist Party leaders planned sabotage operations and were arrested in 1963; and related sites of foundational importance to the liberation story. The serial site extends transnationally to encompass associated sites in other countries connected to Mandela's networks of solidarity and exile. Together these places embody the universal values of human dignity, freedom, and reconciliation that Mandela came to represent, and their inscription formalizes their status among the most important heritage sites in the world.

The Emergence of Modern Human Behaviour: The Pleistocene Occupation Sites of South Africa was inscribed in 2024 as a serial cultural World Heritage Site comprising a network of coastal cave sites in the Western and Eastern Cape provinces. These sites document with extraordinary richness the emergence of modern human cognitive and symbolic behaviour approximately 80,000 to 100,000 years ago, making them among the most important archaeological localities on earth. The inscribed sites include Blombos Cave on the southern Cape coast, where excavations led by Professor Francesco d'Errico and Professor Christopher Henshilwood have revealed ochre engraved with abstract geometric designs dating to approximately 75,000 years ago, considered some of the earliest evidence of symbolic thought in the human record; Pinnacle Point near Mossel Bay, where hearths, shell middens, and engraved ochre provide evidence of early systematic resource exploitation; Klasies River Caves at the mouth of the Klasies River, which yielded some of the earliest known anatomically modern human skeletal remains alongside evidence of shellfish harvesting and use of fire; and associated sites that together form an unparalleled archive of the moment when human beings first began to think and express themselves in ways we would recognize as distinctively human.

Festivals and Events: South Africa Through the Year

South Africa's festival calendar reflects its extraordinary cultural diversity and is worth building a trip around if time and interests align.

The Cape Town International Jazz Festival, held annually in late March or early April, is one of Africa's largest and most respected jazz festivals, drawing major international and African artists over two nights at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. The festival celebrates the rich jazz tradition of Cape Town and South Africa more broadly.

The Franschhoek Cap Classique and Champagne Festival, held in late November, celebrates South Africa's sparkling wine tradition in the beautiful setting of the Huguenot village. It is a relaxed and sociable event at which producers pour their wines and food vendors provide appropriate accompaniment.

The National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, officially renamed Makhanda, in the Eastern Cape, held each year in late June and early July, is the largest arts festival on the African continent. Modeled partly on the Edinburgh Festival, it encompasses theatre, dance, music, visual art, film, and street performance across a range of main program and fringe events. The festival transforms the small university town for approximately ten days and is a remarkable celebration of South African and African creative talent.

The Oppikoppi Music Festival, held annually in August in the Bushveld of Limpopo Province, is South Africa's most beloved rock and alternative music festival, a multi-stage, multi-day event held on a farm at which camping is obligatory and the red dust of the Bushveld becomes part of the experience.

The Knysna Oyster Festival in July celebrates the Garden Route town's famous oysters and oyster farming tradition over ten days of tastings, races, concerts, and events. The Cycle Tour festival that bookends it has grown to one of the largest timed cycling events in the world.