Western Cape
Discover Western Cape
Introduction
The Western Cape is the south-western corner of South Africa, and it operates on a different climate from the rest of the country: Mediterranean, with winter rain and dry summers, which is why it grows wine and wheat where the rest of South Africa grows maize.
Cape Town sits between Table Mountain and the sea, with the Cape Peninsula running south to the Cape of Good Hope and Robben Island — where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen years, now a UNESCO site — visible from the waterfront. The mountain is part of the Cape Floral Region, the smallest of the world’s six floral kingdoms and by far the richest for its size: around nine thousand plant species, two thirds of them found nowhere else, most of them the low scrub called fynbos.
Inland, the Winelands at Stellenbosch, Franschhoek and Paarl have been making wine since the 1650s, in valleys of Cape Dutch gabled farmhouses under bare mountains. East of them the Garden Route runs along the coast through forest and lagoon to Tsitsikamma, and Hermanus is one of the best places on earth to watch southern right whales from land between June and November. Behind the mountains lies the Karoo, semi-desert, enormous and very quiet.