1 destination · 28 things to do

South Africa

Cape Town is the city that stops first-timers in their tracks: a flat-topped mountain rising straight out of the streets, two oceans meeting at the tip of a wild peninsula, penguins on a town beach, and some of the oldest vineyards outside Europe forty minutes inland. It is also a city with a history that demands attention, from the cell on Robben Island where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen years to the empty ground of District Six and the painted houses of the Bo-Kaap. This guide books it properly — the cableway up Table Mountain, the ferry and prison tour to Robben Island, a day around the Cape Peninsula to Cape Point and the Boulders penguin colony, Zeitz MOCAA in its carved grain silo, and wine days on the Franschhoek Wine Tram and in Stellenbosch — and pairs it with the Cape Town that costs little or nothing: the sunrise scramble up Lion's Head, Kirstenbosch and its summer concerts, the V&A Waterfront, and the whale-watching cliffs of Hermanus. Then it matches you to the right hotel, from a glass-pillowed suite on top of the silo and the pink grande dame of the City Bowl to a mountain-backed retreat above Camps Bay and old Cape Dutch estates among the vines, because in a city shaped by mountain and sea, where you sleep decides what you see first each morning.