Cape Town sits at the meeting point of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, close to the Cape of Good Hope, a headland that terrified and awed early European sailors attempting to round Africa’s southern tip, so treacherous it was originally named the Cape of Storms before being deliberately renamed to sound more inviting to future explorers. Table Mountain, rising directly above the city, has served as a natural landmark for maritime navigation since the earliest Dutch and Portuguese voyages passed along the coast.
The city was founded in 1652 as a supply station for the Dutch East India Company, intended purely as a practical waypoint for ships travelling between Europe and Asia, not as a settlement meant to grow into a major city, a modest beginning that shaped much of South Africa’s subsequent colonial history.
A City Confronting a Complicated History Directly
Robben Island, visible from Cape Town’s harbour, held political prisoners for centuries, most famously Nelson Mandela, imprisoned there for 18 of his 27 years of incarceration under apartheid, and now operates as a museum and UNESCO World Heritage Site specifically to ensure that history isn’t forgotten. District Six, a formerly vibrant, multiracial inner-city neighbourhood, was forcibly cleared under apartheid-era laws in the 1970s, its residents relocated and most buildings demolished, a deliberate act of destruction the city has worked since to memorialise rather than quietly move past.
Cape Town’s Bo-Kaap neighbourhood, known for its brightly coloured houses, developed as home to the city’s Cape Malay Muslim community, its vivid colour palette reportedly emerging after slavery’s abolition, when residents began painting their houses in bold, individually chosen colours as an expression of newfound freedom.
Painting Mountain, Ocean, and Colour
Table Mountain’s flat silhouette above Cape Town’s colourful streets and twin oceans gives a watercolourist dramatic scale and vivid colour to work with. We’ve captured that setting in our own Cape Town Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of South Africa for a wall at home.
Founded as a modest supply stop and shaped since by history it continues to actively reckon with, Cape Town remains one of the more layered, complicated, and visually extraordinary cities on Earth.