Rough Guides - The Rough Guide to Cape Town, The Winelands and the Garden Route

This Rough Guide is one of a new generation of informative and easy-to-use travel-guide ebooks that guarantees you make the most of your trip. An essential tool for pre-trip planning, it also makes a great travel companion when youre on the road.

From the section.

Detailed area maps feature in the guide chapters and are also listed in the , accessible from the table of contents. Depending on your hardware, you can double-tap on the maps to see larger-scale versions, or select different scales. There are also thumbnails below more detailed maps in these cases, you can opt to zoom left/top or zoom right/bottom or view the full map. The screen-lock function on your device is recommended when viewing enlarged maps. Make sure you have the latest software updates, too.

Throughout the guide, weve flagged up our favourite places a perfectly sited hotel, an atmospheric caf, a special restaurant with the author pick icon . You can select your own favourites and create a personalized itinerary by bookmarking the sights, venues and activities that are of interest, giving you the quickest possible access to everything youll need for your time away.

Above V&A Waterfront

Cape Town is southern Africas most beautiful, most romantic and most visited city. Its precolonial Khoikhoi inhabitants recognized its extraordinary physical setting when they referred to Table Mountain, the citys emblematic landmark, as Hoerikwaggo the mountain in the sea. If the landscape doesnt take your breath away, its high-octane activities from paragliding to kitesurfing should do the trick, and thats before youve sampled the nightlife. Which isnt to say Cape Town is just about adrenaline. Away from the thrills and pumping party scene, youll find a city boasting breathtaking beaches, rolling vineyards and fine museums enough to keep you busy over an extended visit. Despite this, most visitors find the time to escape the city to the Winelands, to sample South Africas celebrated wines, and further east along the Garden Route, whose draws include unparalleled whale watching, crashing seascapes, dappled forests and lions, leopards and elephants in the best game reserve in the southern half of the country.

Cape Town has a rich urban texture too, etched in its diverse architecture. In the suburbs, shimmering white Cape Dutch homesteads, rooted in seventeenth-century northern European traditions, characterize the grand estates of the Constantia Winelands; in the city, Muslim slaves, freed in the nineteenth century, added their minarets to the centres skyline; and the English, who invaded and later freed these slaves, introduced Georgian and Victorian buildings. In the tight terraces of the Bo-Kaap quarter and the tenements of District Six, the coloured descendants of slaves evolved a unique, evocatively Capetonian brand of jazz, which is well worth catching live. Indeed great sounds, along with high standards of accommodation, smart restaurants, laidback cafs and a vibrant gay scene, make visiting Cape Town a truly cosmopolitan experience.

But despite a reputation for greater liberalism and racial tolerance during apartheid than the rest of the country, Cape Town has been the slowest South African city to embrace post-apartheid multiracialism. Ever since the mid-seventeenth century when Jan van Riebeeck, leader of the first white people to settle in South Africa, thought of digging a canal across the Cape Peninsula to cut it off from the rest of Africa, Cape Town has stood aloof from the rest of the country. For 350 years its white establishment endeavoured to maintain an illusion that the city was somehow really European, despite its location.

Under apartheid, black people were forcedly removed from the Western Cape, where coloured people were given preference in the job market. Consequently, black Africans make up less than forty percent of the Mother City, whereas they comprise over eighty percent nationwide; the Western Cape and neighbouring Northern Cape are the only provinces where coloured, rather than black, people form the majority. For most Capetonians, living in crowded townships, poverty and sky-high crime rates are part of everyday life.