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| Home - City Guide - Cape Town - City Overview | ||
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City Overview Cape Town is the epicentre of the Western Cape region of South Africa, and it is easy to forget that the city is surrounded by wild beaches, rugged mountain chains and bucolic wine farms. Home to nomadic Khoi-San hunter-gatherers for at least 30 000 years, the Cape Peninsula was first settled by Dutch sailors, led by Jan van Riebeeck, on April 6, 1652, although Portuguese sailors led by Bartholomeu Diaz first made landfall here in 1496. Strolling through the city centre, every corner hides another facet of this fascinating city. Seasoned travellers will find themselves confused, as a little bit of Paris merges into New York, London, Lagos, Nairobi and Addis Ababa. Boutiques selling the latest in European designer clothes snuggle side by side brash American brand-name stores, with obscure African art galleries hidden in between. There is a polyglot of languages spoken on the streets, traders sell food on corner stalls that reflect the cuisines of Africa, and in the street markets, the art is as much South African as Nigerian or Masai. This is one of the reasons why Cape Town stakes a claim as one of the most bewitching cities on the planet - it is an African city at heart, but manages to assimilate a huge diversity of cultural influences: African, European, Asian, and even a little bit of America as the ubiquitous McDonald's and Planet Hollywood signs begin to intrude into the fabric of one of Africa's oldest cities. The world has not been slow in discovering Cape Town, even if Cape Town is sometimes a tad slow in discovering the world, with its often sloppy standards of service and casual attitude to the needs of tourists. The locals are notoriously laid-back, making Cape Town one of the most relaxed places on earth. Even the bankers sometimes go to work in jeans and t-shirts. In summer, it is hard to escape the glitz of international film crews shooting features, commercials and fashion shoots on every second street corner, lured by great foreign exchange rates, exotic locations, a world-class infrastructure and a seemingly endless supply of drop dead beautiful extras, both male and female. Cape Town is, however, immediately surrounded by the ever-visible legacy of apartheid. The road into the city from the airport runs through a sprawling shanty town, a hangover from the days of the notorious Group Areas Act, which reserved the prime city land for whites, and condemned black and coloured, or mixed-race, people to the bleak, windswept Cape Flats. The suburbs are now rapidly integrating as economic barriers collapse, but the shanty towns are also growing by the day as rural job-seekers are drawn to the city in search of work. Further afield, Cape Town blossoms again. To the east, lies the mysterious beauty of the Overberg and the rolling plains, deserted beaches and high mountains of the Southern Cape. To the north and northwest, the misty, harsh beauty of the West Coast, the wilderness areas of the Cedarberg and Ceres Karoo and the springtime explosion of hallucinogenic colours as Namaqualand bursts into flower. Less than an hour's drive from the city centre, some of the best New World wines are produced, many of them on small 'boutique' estates. These welcome visitors for tasting sessions and hedonistic picnics surrounded by the rich smell of grape musk, with the towering peaks of the Cape mountains overhead. It is not just the summer months (October to April) that make the Cape so attractive: Winter (June to September) is the Cape's best kept secret, the locals even call it 'the secret season'. There are weeks between the rain and freezing winds that are hot and clear, the tourist crowds are gone, and the whales and dolphins come home to play in the myriad of small bays that dot the rugged coastline of the Cape Peninsula. |
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