Cape Town

Cape Town is a big city in South Africa.

It sits by the sea, with mountains all around. One mountain has a flat top, like a table. It is called Table Mountain.

Cape Town is South Africa's oldest city. It lies on Table Bay, with three mountains curving around its center: Devil's Peak, Table Mountain and Lion's Head.

South Africa has three capitals, and Cape Town is the legislative capital, where Parliament meets. Pretoria is the administrative capital and Bloemfontein the judicial one. South Africa's 2022 census counted 4,772,846 people in the City of Cape Town, 27.6 percent more than in 2011.

South Africa divides its capital functions: Pretoria is the administrative capital, Cape Town the legislative capital and Bloemfontein the judicial capital, while the Constitutional Court sits in Johannesburg. Cape Town, the country's oldest city, curves around Table Bay below Devil's Peak, Table Mountain and Lion's Head.

Statistics South Africa's Census 2022, the country's first digital census, counted 4,772,846 people in the City of Cape Town, 27.6 percent more than in 2011, in 1,452,845 households; average household size fell from 3.5 to 3.3 people.

A cable car carries people up Table Mountain. The floor of each car turns around, so everyone gets to see the view.

Out in the bay is an island with a museum. People ride a ferry to visit it.

The Table Mountain cableway opened on 4 October 1929. Before that, visitors had to hike up the mountain's front face. Its modern cars carry 65 passengers, and the floor turns all the way around on the way up, so everyone gets a view. The ride takes under ten minutes.

Out in Table Bay lies Robben Island. For centuries it was used as a prison. Nelson Mandela, who later became South Africa's president, spent 18 of his 27 years in prison there. Since 1997 the island has been a museum, and ferries take visitors there from the V&A Waterfront.

The cableway was inaugurated on 4 October 1929 after earlier plans for a rack railway and a funicular were halted by war; before it, the usual route up was Platteklip Gorge. Its original cars were wood and tin; Swiss-made Rotair cars now carry 65 passengers at up to 10 m/s, their floors rotating through 360 degrees.

Robben Island was used between the 17th and 20th centuries as a prison, a hospital for people the authorities wanted isolated and a military base. From 1959 it held a maximum-security prison where political prisoners opposed to apartheid were held; Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison there. The last prisoners left in 1991, the prison closed in 1996, the museum was established in 1997, and UNESCO inscribed the island in 1999. Tours are guided by former political prisoners.

In Cape Town you can ride a boat across the bay.

You can ride a cable car up the mountain. Or you can walk up on a trail!

Ferries to Robben Island leave from the Nelson Mandela Gateway at the V&A Waterfront, beside the harbor. A tour, including the boat trip there and back, takes about three and a half hours.

To reach the top of Table Mountain, people either ride the cableway or hike. Platteklip Gorge, a route up the mountain's front face, is the first recorded way up: Antonio de Saldanha climbed it in the 1500s. Many people walk up and ride the cable car down.

Robben Island tours start at the Nelson Mandela Gateway at the V&A Waterfront and last about 3.5 hours including the ferry crossing, depending on the boat used.

The Table Mountain cableway runs from Tafelberg Road; before it opened in 1929, visitors climbed, usually by Platteklip Gorge, the route of the first documented ascent, by the Portuguese navigator Antonio de Saldanha in the 16th century. South African Tourism advises checking the weather before going up, because the Cape's micro-climates change quickly.

Cape Town's mountains are covered with special bushes called fynbos. Many have bright flowers.

Furry animals called rock hyraxes live on top of Table Mountain.

The mountains around Cape Town are part of the Cape Floral Region, a World Heritage Site since 2004. Its main plant life is fynbos, a shrubland of fine-leaved bushes. The region covers less than half a percent of Africa but holds nearly a fifth of its plants, and about 1,470 kinds of plants grow on Table Mountain alone. Rock hyraxes, lizards and mongooses live up there too.

In the city center, Parliament, the National Gallery, a museum and planetarium, and the National Library stand around the edges of the Company's Garden.

UNESCO's Cape Floral Region Protected Areas, inscribed in 2004, form one of the six Floral Kingdoms of the world, by far the smallest and relatively the most diverse: less than 0.5 percent of Africa's area but nearly 20 percent of its flora, with some 69 percent of an estimated 9,000 plant species found nowhere else. The dominant fynbos is a fine-leaved shrubland adapted to a Mediterranean climate and to fire; scientists study its fire adaptations and its seed dispersal by ants and termites.

Around the Company's Garden stand the Houses of Parliament, the National Gallery, the Iziko Museum and Planetarium, the National Library of South Africa and the Centre for the Book. St George's Cathedral, built of Table Mountain sandstone from 1901, earned the name "the people's cathedral" for its stand against apartheid.