2 Best Sights in Cape Town, South Africa

Background Illustration for Sights

Cape Town has grown as a city in a way that few others in the world have. Take a good look at the street names. Strand and Waterkant streets (meaning "beach" and "waterside," respectively) are now far from the sea. However, when they were named, they were right on the beach. An enormous program of dumping rubble into the ocean extended the city by a good few square miles (thanks to the Dutch obsession with reclaiming land from the sea). Almost all the city on the seaward side of Strand and Waterkant is part of the reclaimed area of the city known as the Foreshore. If you look at old paintings of the city, you will see that originally waves lapped at the very walls of the castle, now more than half a mile from the ocean.

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa

Fodor's Choice

Opened in 2017, Zeitz MOCAA is the first major museum dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Inhabiting the massively renovated historic Grain Silo in what is now called the Silo District of the V&A Waterfront, the museum itself is a work of art, reimagined by British designer Thomas Heatherwick. In many ways, the building itself is the reason to visit; from the outside it's enchanting, while inside you get a sense of the strangeness of the transformation from one sort of building into another. Inside, it's worth staring up and then slowly exploring the levels, using the elevator and the spiral stairway to seek out different perspectives. The exhibits change fairly regularly and are a mixed bag, although it must be said that since the pandemic, the emphasis has turned altogether to more serious and conceptual work with fewer displays of emotionally engaging artworks than the museum kicked off with. Still, you never know what might be on the walls when you're in town, and there are always new things to discover, even if the white-wall exhibition spaces themselves are less interesting than the architectural framework that holds them all together. There's also a fabulous art-centric souvenir store on the ground floor, and in the basement, there are children's workshops that may be worth investigating if you have children in tow.

South African National Gallery

Gardens

This museum houses a good collection of 19th- and 20th-century European art, but its most interesting exhibits are the South African works, many of which reflect the country's traumatic history. The gallery owns an enormous body of work (most of it in storage in the basement), so exhibitions change regularly, but there's always something provocative—whether it's documentary photographs or a multimedia exhibit chronicling efforts to "disrupt" traditional boundaries.