A Dutch East India Company market garden at the foot of a flat-topped mountain grew into a port where two oceans meet, a prison island held the man who would lead its liberation, and a city once run as a stopover became one of the world’s most photographed skylines.

Khoikhoi pastoralists had grazed cattle around Table Bay for centuries before Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape in 1488 — naming it, in the face of the storms that nearly wrecked his ships, the Cape of Storms, a name King John II of Portugal is said to have changed to Cabo da Boa Esperança, the Cape of Good Hope, for the sea route to India it promised — and before Vasco da Gama passed the same waters in 1497 on the voyage that opened that route; neither landing left a permanent settlement. That came in 1652, when the Dutch East India Company sent Jan van Riebeeck to build not a colony but a resupply station at the foot of Table Mountain, growing fresh produce and trading livestock with local Khoikhoi to restock Company ships travelling between the Netherlands and its possessions in the East Indies; enslaved people brought by the Company from West Africa, Madagascar and its Asian territories built and worked the settlement, a slave-based economy that shaped the Cape for the two centuries before Britain finally abolished slavery there in 1834.

Britain occupied the Cape in 1795 to keep it from a French-allied Dutch government, handed it back under an 1803 peace treaty, then retook it for good in 1806 after the Battle of Blaauwberg, formalising British possession in an 1814 treaty; Cape Town went on to serve as the Cape Colony’s capital and, after the 1910 Union of South Africa, as the country’s legislative capital and seat of Parliament, a role it still holds alongside Pretoria and Bloemfontein. Apartheid, formalised after 1948, declared the multiracial inner-city neighbourhood of District Six a whites-only area in 1966 and forcibly removed most of its roughly 60,000 residents over the following years, bulldozing their homes; Robben Island, a former leper colony in Table Bay, became a maximum-security prison for political prisoners, holding Nelson Mandela for 18 of his 27 years in custody until his 1990 release, when he gave his first public address from the balcony of Cape Town’s City Hall. South Africa held its first democratic elections in 1994, and Cape Town went on to host matches of the 2010 FIFA World Cup at a new stadium built beneath the same mountain the Dutch had once provisioned ships against — Table Mountain, voted one of the New7Wonders of Nature in 2011 and, since 2020, the backdrop to the Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher, filmed in the kelp forest at its foot.