Cape Town

Cape Town serves as South Africa’s legislative capital and is the nation’s oldest city, hosting the Parliament of South Africa. By population, it ranks as the country’s second-largest city, trailing only Johannesburg, and it is the largest city in the Western Cape. The city falls under the jurisdiction of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality. The city is celebrated for its harbor, its natural setting within the Cape Floristic Region, and landmarks like Table Mountain and Cape Point.

Situated on the shores of Table Bay, the City Bowl area—which houses the central business district—is the oldest urban zone in the Western Cape and holds considerable cultural heritage. The metropolitan area features a lengthy Atlantic Ocean coastline, with a northern section in the West Beach region and the False Bay area to the south. Table Mountain National Park lies within city limits, and several other nature reserves and marine-protected areas exist in and around the city.

Among these is Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, which contains five of South Africa’s six biomes and showcases many plants native to the Cape region. A popular global tourist destination, Cape Town has repeatedly been named the best city in the world and the world’s best city for travelers. These honors include recognition by The New York Times in 2014, Time Out in 2025, the World Travel Awards in 2026, and The Telegraph for eight consecutive years from 2017 through 2025.

The city boasts South Africa’s highest household incomes, lowest unemployment rate, highest level of infrastructure investment, strongest service delivery performance, greatest tourism appeal, and most robust real estate market.

Early period

The earliest known signs of human occupation in the region were uncovered at Peers Cave in Fish Hoek in the late 1920s. Earlier estimates suggesting an upper Pleistocene origin have since been revised. At their most generous and conservative, radiocarbon dating by D. D. Stynder and colleagues places SAM-AP 4692 in the mid-Holocene, around 5448 and 5136 BCE (or 7457 and 7145 cal BP), respectively. Bartolomeu Dias, the first European to reach the area, arrived in 1488 and named it “Cape of Storms.”

It was later renamed “Cape of Good Hope” by John II of Portugal, reflecting the optimism sparked by the opening of a sea route to the Indian subcontinent and East Indies. In 1497, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama recorded a sighting of the Cape of Good Hope. In 1510, at the Battle of Salt River, Portuguese admiral Francisco de Almeida and sixty-four of his men were killed, and his party was defeated by the Goringhaiqua (in approximate Dutch spelling), who used cattle trained to respond to whistles and shouts.

The Goringhaiqua were one of the Khoikhoi clans living in the area. By the late 16th century, French, Danish, Dutch, and English ships—but mainly Portuguese—regularly stopped in Table Bay on their way to the Indies, trading tobacco, copper, and iron with local Khoikhoi clans for fresh meat and other essential provisions.

In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck and other employees of the United East India Company (VOC) were sent to the Cape Colony to establish a way-station for ships traveling to the Dutch East Indies, along with Fort de Goede Hoop (later replaced by the Castle of Good Hope). The settlement grew slowly due to a shortage of labor, which prompted local authorities to import enslaved people from Indonesia and Madagascar. Many of these individuals are ancestors of today’s Cape Coloured and Cape Malay communities. Under Van Riebeeck and his successors—VOC commanders and later governors at the Cape—a wide range of agricultural plants were introduced, including grapes, cereals, ground nuts, potatoes, apples, and citrus, which had a lasting impact on the region’s societies and economies.

When the Dutch Republic became a vassal of Revolutionary France as the Batavian Republic, Great Britain moved to take control of Dutch colonies, including VOC possessions. Britain captured Cape Town in 1795, but it was returned to the Dutch by treaty in 1803. British forces occupied the Cape again in 1806 after the Battle of Blaauwberg, as the Batavian Republic allied with Britain’s rival, France, during the Napoleonic Wars. After the war, Cape Town was permanently ceded to the United Kingdom under the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814.

The city became the capital of the newly formed Cape Colony, whose territory expanded substantially through the 1800s, partly due to numerous wars with the amaXhosa on the colony’s eastern frontier. In 1833, slavery was abolished in the colony, freeing over 5,500 slaves in the city—nearly a third of its population at the time. The Convict Crisis of 1849, marked by major civil unrest, strengthened calls for self-governance in the Cape. As the colony expanded, demands for greater independence from the UK grew, leading to the Cape attaining its own parliament in 1854 and a locally accountable prime minister in 1872.

Suffrage was established under the non-racial Cape Qualified Franchise. During the 1850s and 1860s, British authorities introduced additional plant species from Australia. Notably, rooikrans was brought in to stabilize the sand of the Cape Flats, enabling a road connecting the peninsula to the rest of Africa, and eucalyptus was used to drain marshes.