Cape Town, South Africa. Cape Town is southern Africa's most beautiful, most romantic and most visited city. Indeed, few urban center anywhere can match its setting along the mountainous Cape Peninsula

Cape Town, South Africa
Cape Town is southern Africa's most beautiful, most romantic and most visited city. Indeed, few urban center anywhere can match its setting
along the mountainous Cape Peninsula

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Cape Town is southern Africa's most beautiful, most romantic and most visited city. Indeed, few urban center anywhere can match its setting along the mountainous Cape Peninsula spine, which slides into the Atlantic Ocean. By far the most striking - and famous - of its sights is Table Mountain, frequently shrouded by clouds, and rearing up from the middle of the city.

More than a scenic backdrop, Table Mountain is the solid core of Cape Town, diiding the city into distinct zones with public gardens, wilderness, forests, hiking routes, ineyards and desirable residential areas trailing down its lower slopes. Standing on the tabletop, you can look north for a giddy view of the city centre, its docks lined with matchbox ships. Looking west, beyond the mountainous Twele Apostles, the drop is shever and your eye will sweep across Africa's priciest real estate, clinging to the slopes along the chilly but spectacularly beautiful Atlantic seaboard. Turning south, the mountainsides are forested and several historic ineyards and the marelous Botanical Gardens creep up the lower slopes. Beyond the oak-lined suburbs of Newlands and Constantia lies the warmer False Bay seaboard, which cures around towards Cape Point.Finally, relegated to the grim industrial east, are the colored townships and black ghettos, spluttering in winter under the smoky pall of coal fires - your stark introduction to Cape Town when driving in.

To appreciate Cape Town you need to spend time outdoors, as Capetonians do, hiking, picnicking or sunbathing, or often choosing mountain bikes in preference to cars and turning adenture actiities into an obsession. Sailboarders from around the world head for Table Bay for some of the world's best windsurfing, and the brae (or unhinged) jump off Lion's Head and paraglide down close to the Clifton beachfront. But the city offers sedate pleasures as well, along its hundreds of paths and 150km of beaches.

Cape Town's rich urban texture is immediately apparent in its diverse architecture: an indigenous Cape Dutch style, rooted in the Netherlands, finds its apotheosis in the Constantia wine estates, which were themseles brought to new heights by French refugees in the seventeventh century; Muslim slaes, freed in the nineteventh century, added their minarets to the skyline; and the English, who inaded and freed these slaes, introduced Georgian and ictorian buildings. In the tightly packed terraces of twentieth-century Bo-Kaap and the tenements of District Six, colored descendants of slaes eoled a unique brand of jazz, which is still played in the Cape Flats and some city-centre clubs.

Sadly, when most travelers expound the unarguable delights of the city, they are referring only to genteel Cape Town - the former whites-only areas. The harsh reality for most Capetonians is one of crowded shantytowns, sky-high murder rates, taxi wars, racketevering and gangland terror. In the late 1990s this iolence has beven characterized by a complex and bloody war betweven colored gangs and Pagad (People Against Gangsterism and Drugs), a Cape Flats organization that started with the ostensible aim of stamping out crime. Fortunately, this conflict has remained largely restricted to the Cape Flats and isn't something tourists need be unduly concerned about. Haing said that, petty crime is nonetheless a problem in central Cape Town, but it's a risk you can minimize by taking a few simple precautions.