Cape Town

Table Mountain is the heart of Cape Town's identity and its essential experience. The flat-topped summit, over a kilometre high, can be reached by the rotating Aerial Cableway (weather permitting — high winds and cloud, the “tablecloth”, close it regularly) or by hiking trails such as Platteklip Gorge, and the top offers staggering 360-degree views over the city, Robben Island, the Atlantic and the spine of the peninsula. The mountain and its chain are protected within Table Mountain National Park, part of the UNESCO-listed Cape Floral Region with its unique fynbos vegetation. Below, the City Bowl cradles the historic centre — the Company's Garden, museums, the Castle of Good Hope, the buzzing Long Street and the District Six Museum — while on the mountain's lower slopes sits the world-renowned Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, where indigenous plants flow down the hillside and summer sunset concerts draw crowds. Nearby, the Bo-Kaap quarter, with its steep cobbled streets of vividly painted houses and its Cape Malay heritage, mosques and cuisine, is one of the city's most photographed and characterful neighbourhoods. The famous flat top is a genuine geological accident: a cap of exceptionally hard quartzitic sandstone resisted erosion while wind and water wore away the softer surrounding rock over millions of years, leaving the cap level while everything around it lowered.

The V&A Waterfront, set around a working harbour with Table Mountain as a backdrop, is the city's most popular destination — a lively waterfront of restaurants, shops, markets, hotels and attractions where locals and visitors mingle. Here you'll find the Two Oceans Aquarium, the giant observation wheel, harbour cruises, and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA), a major gallery dramatically carved out of a historic grain silo. The Waterfront is also the departure point for ferries to Robben Island, the UNESCO World Heritage site in Table Bay where Nelson Mandela and other leaders were imprisoned; tours, often led by former inmates, are among the most powerful and meaningful experiences in the city. From the Waterfront the Atlantic Seaboard runs south along the coast to the chic beach suburbs of Sea Point (with its popular seaside promenade), Clifton's sheltered coves and the palm-lined beach and sunset bars of Camps Bay beneath the Twelve Apostles peaks — the place to round off a day by the sea.

South of the city, the Cape Peninsula offers one of the world's classic scenic day trips. The drive down the Atlantic side passes the fishing harbour and seafood of Hout Bay before the spectacular, cliff-carved toll road of Chapman's Peak Drive, with its plunging ocean views. At the peninsula's tip lies the Cape of Good Hope section of Table Mountain National Park, a wild, windswept reserve of fynbos, baboons, antelope and seabirds, where you can stand at the rocky Cape of Good Hope and ride the funicular (or climb) up to the old lighthouse at Cape Point for views over the meeting of oceans. Returning up the gentler False Bay coast, the highlight is Boulders Beach near Simon's Town, home to a charming colony of African penguins that waddle among the boulders and can be watched from boardwalks. The naval town of Simon's Town, the surf and whales of False Bay (southern right whales visit in winter and spring), and the seaside village of Kalk Bay complete a full and memorable loop. Two honest corrections earn their place here: the oceans' official meeting point is Cape Agulhas further east, not Cape Point — though the converging currents and weather made this headland genuinely hazardous to sail — and the Boulders colony sits exactly where it does because the granite boulders shelter the penguins from wind and predators within reach of reliable food just offshore.

Cape Town is one of the great food-and-wine cities, and eating and drinking are central to a visit. The city has a vibrant restaurant and market scene — from the Old Biscuit Mill's Neighbourgoods Market and the V&A Food Market to fine dining and the Cape Malay cuisine of the Bo-Kaap (bobotie, curries, koeksisters) — and a strong coffee and craft culture. Wine is on the doorstep: the historic Constantia estates within the city are among the oldest in the New World, and just inland the Cape Winelands — the beautiful old towns of Stellenbosch, Franschhoek and Paarl, set among vine-striped valleys and mountains — make an essential day trip or overnight, with cellar tours, tastings and renowned restaurants (Franschhoek even runs a hop-on wine tram). Whales, beaches, mountains and markets aside, a long lunch at a winelands estate with a view of the mountains is, for many, the defining Cape pleasure, and the reason the region is so beloved by food and wine travellers.