Cape Town Audio Tours

Cape Town is visually dramatic in a way that feels almost unfair. Table Mountain, a kilometre-long flat sandstone mesa, forms one edge of the bowl the city sits in, and the Cape Peninsula drops south through mountains to the continent's true tip at Cape Agulhas. From Signal Hill at sunset, with the Atlantic catching the light below and the mountain going purple, the city makes an argument for itself that is difficult to resist. The cable car up Table Mountain is one of the few tourist experiences that genuinely lives up to the photographs.

But Cape Town is also the city where the Dutch East India Company built its first supply station in 1652, where Dutch and then British colonialism concentrated in their most organized form, and where apartheid policy was most visibly practiced in the forced removals that cleared District Six of its 60,000 residents in the 1970s.

The District Six Museum on Buitenkant Street is one of the most emotionally honest museums in Africa, built by and for the community that was destroyed. Robben Island, 12 kilometres offshore, where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 imprisonment years, is reachable by ferry from the V&A Waterfront. Both are essential and both leave you with something to carry for a while.