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Table Mountain
The flat-topped sandstone landmark above Cape Town
Table Mountain is the flat-topped sandstone massif that looms over Cape Town, its level summit plateau stretching nearly three kilometres and rising to 1,086 metres at Maclear's Beacon. When moist air spills over the rim, a smooth sheet of cloud - the famous tablecloth - pours down its face. One of the oldest mountains on Earth and an emblem of South Africa, it is the centrepiece of a national park threaded through the city and a hotspot of botanical diversity found nowhere else.
The mountain is built of hard, ancient sandstone laid down some 500 million years ago and later uplifted and worn flat, a remnant far older than the Himalaya or the Alps. Its summit hosts the fynbos, a fine-leaved shrubland of staggering plant diversity - the small Cape Peninsula carries more plant species than the whole of the British Isles, many of them endemic. Sheer cliffs ring the plateau, riven by ravines and home to the dassie, a small mammal that is, improbably, the elephant's closest living relative. A cableway carries visitors to the top.
Long known to the Khoekhoe peoples who called it Hoerikwaggo, the mountain of the sea, Table Mountain became a navigational landmark for the European ships that rounded the Cape from the fifteenth century onward. Today it is protected within Table Mountain National Park and was named one of the New Seven Wonders of Nature. It draws hikers, climbers, and millions of cableway riders, and its silhouette is inseparable from the identity of Cape Town below.