Cape Town
South Africa's legislative capital, beneath Table Mountain
Few cities have a more theatrical setting than Cape Town, which curves around a bay at the foot of Table Mountain near the southern tip of Africa. The flat-topped massif, often draped in a spilling cloud the locals call the tablecloth, looms above a harbor where the cold Atlantic meets the warmer waters rounding the Cape of Good Hope. South Africa's legislative capital and its second-largest city, with a metropolitan population approaching five million, Cape Town pairs Cape Dutch and Victorian streetscapes with vineyards, beaches and the wild peninsula that trails south toward Cape Point.
The city wraps the lower slopes of Table Mountain and spreads across the sandy Cape Flats toward the mountains of the interior. Two oceans' worth of currents shape its weather, with hot, dry, wind-raked summers and wet winters that feed the surrounding fynbos, a botanical kingdom found nowhere else. The mountain itself, a sandstone and granite block rising to over a thousand meters, is the centerpiece of a national park threaded through the urban fabric. A severe drought late in the last decade brought the city to the brink of a Day Zero water shutoff, a warning about life on the dry Cape.
The Dutch East India Company planted a supply station here in 1652 to provision ships on the long route to Asia, making this the oldest European-founded city in South Africa and the seed of a colonial society built on enslaved and indentured labor. Robben Island, visible offshore, held Nelson Mandela for much of his imprisonment and is now a memorial. Cape Town hosts South Africa's Parliament — one of three capitals in a country that splits its functions — and draws visitors from around the world to its waterfront, winelands and mountain, even as deep inequality persists across the Cape Flats.