V&A Waterfront, Robben Island and De Waterkant
The Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, known locally as the Waterfront, is Cape Town’s original Victorian harbour, incorporating nineteenth-century buildings, shopping malls, waterside piers and a functioning harbour that all share a magnificent Table Mountain backdrop. Redeveloped in the 1990s, it is the city’s most popular tourist precinct for shopping, eating and drinking, and incorporates the Nelson Mandela Gateway – the embarkation point for unmissable trips to Robben Island. West of the Foreshore, with the Waterfront to its north, is De Waterkant, a once down-at-heel district that has gentrified at a cracking pace to become Cape Town’s self-styled gay quarter and a significant draw for tourists, with plentiful accommodation, bars and shops.
The V&A Waterfront
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, arguments raged in Cape Town over the need for a proper dock. The Cape was often known as the Cape of Storms because of its vicious weather, which left Table Bay littered with wrecks. Many makeshift attempts were made to improve the situation, including the construction of a lighthouse in 1823, and work began on a jetty at the bottom of Bree Street in 1832. With the increase in sea traffic arriving at the Cape in the 1850s, and over thirty vessels wrecked during the winter storms of June 1858, clamour for a harbour grew. It reached its peak in 1860, when insurer Lloyd’s of London refused the risk of covering ships dropping anchor in Table Bay.
The British colonial government dragged its heels due to the costs involved, but eventually conceded. At a huge ceremony in September 1860, the teenage Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son, tipped the first batch of stones into Table Bay to begin the breakwater, the harbour’s westernmost arm. Convicts were enlisted to complete the job, and in 1869, the dock was completed, and the sea was allowed to pour in.
Victoria Wharf
Breakwater Blvd • Daily 9am–9pm • 
waterfront.co.za
The shopping focus of the Waterfront is the Victoria Wharf, an enormous flashy mall on two levels, extending along Quays 5 and 6. The restaurants and cafés on the mall’s southeast side, with their outdoor seating, have fabulous views of Table Mountain across the busy harbour.
Wandering south, you’ll pass the Amphitheatre, where local musicians regularly perform. Look out, too, for Nobel Square, with its bronze statues of South Africa’s four Nobel Peace Prize-winners: Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1984); Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk (both 1993); and the least familiar, Chief Albert John Lutuli (1960), former president of the African National Congress (ANC) and the first African to receive the award.
Watershed
Dock Rd • Daily 10am–7pm • waterfront.co.za
Superseding the old Red and Blue Shed craft markets, the Watershed is a colourful converted warehouse that houses over 150 shops and stalls. It’s a pleasant space to pick up African craftwork and souvenirs, covering the spectrum from township art, traditional handicrafts and batiks to jewellery, leatherwork and contemporary design. The open-plan complex also features the Wellness at the Watershed spa and, upstairs, a public hot-desk space, Workshop 17.
The Waterfront’s two other major markets are food-focused: the daily V&A Food Market, immediately northeast of Watershed, and Saturday Oranjezicht City Farm Market.
exploring the v&A waterfront
Join a tour to get your bearings and discover the long history underlying the buskers’ lazy steel drums and wandering shoppers at the Waterfont, with numerous options available. Cruise vessels from speedboats to the Jack Sparrow-worthy Jolly Roger Pirate Ship also tie up at Quay 5, where touts tempt landlubbers onto the water. Visit waterfront.co.za for details.
Historical Walking Tour 
021 416 6230. Departing from Chavonnes Battery Museum, the 1hr 30min tour takes in sights such as Breakwater Prison (now a hotel), where you can see markings left by nineteenth-century convicts (daily 11am & 2pm; adults R150, under-16s R20).
Awol Tours Their 3hr City Cycle Tour (R600) begins at the Waterfront Information Centre, at 10am daily.
City Sightseeing Between late September and April, their 25min harbour cruise (R40) departs from the jetty behind the Two Oceans Aquarium every 20min.
Two Oceans Aquarium
Dock Rd • Daily 9.30am–6pm, feeding times 11.30am, noon, 2pm, & 2.30pm • Adults R160, children 14–17 R115, 4–13 R75, under-4s free • 021 418 3823, aquarium.co.za
At the Marina’s North Wharf, the Two Oceans Aquarium showcases the Cape’s unique marine environment, where the warm Indian Ocean mixes with the cold Atlantic. Its biggest and newest attraction, the Ocean Exhibit, houses rays, striped bonito, turtles, a giant guitarfish and more in 1.6 million litres of seawater, with a jellyfish gallery on the way in. Another major draw is the Kelp Forest, one of only a handful found in aquariums worldwide, with fish gliding through the kelp and abalone, sea urchins and rock lobsters clinging to the holdfasts. Scuba divers can explore the Kelp Forest and Ocean Exhibit. The shark exhibit is set to reopen in 2017, when the Kelp Forest will close for renovations until 2018.
The general route begins on the ground floor with the Diversity Gallery. Split over two floors, this gallery is home to tropical fish, honeycomb eels and a coral exhibit. It contains an astonishing variety of marine creatures, including giant spider crabs, octopuses and sea horses, the primitive eyeless and jawless hagfish and a display featuring floating gossamer jellyfish. Also on this level is the interactive Touch Pool, where visitors can get their hands wet while asking questions and inspecting animals such as anemones and crabs, and the Microscope Exhibit, where, with the assistance of highly knowledgeable staff, you can observe tiny animals that might otherwise go unnoticed.
The basement houses the Children’s Play Centre, a good place to keep the little ones occupied, with free organized activities such as puppet shows, face painting and arts and crafts. The centre is combined with an area where the resident rockhopper penguins can sometimes be observed frolicking underwater during the day.
The top floor, accessed via a ramp, accommodates the Penguin Exhibit, featuring a small breeding colony of endangered African penguins (which you can see in their natural habitat at Boulders Beach) and the rockhopper penguins.
Nelson Mandela Gateway
Clock Tower Precinct • Daily 7.30am–5.30pm • Free • 021 413 4200, robben-island.org.za
The imposing Clock Tower by the Waterfront’s swing bridge was built as the original Port Captain’s office in 1882. Adjacent to this is the Nelson Mandela Gateway, the embarkation point for ferries to Robben Island and sometimes referred to as Jetty 1. Here, the Robben Island Museum has installed a number of exhibitions that are open to the public and free of charge. Displays cover the individual and collective struggles of those who went through this portal on their way to prison, including accounts by ex-political prisoners, ex-prison warders and the families of both.
Chavonnes Battery Museum
Clock Tower Precinct • Mon–Wed 9am–4pm, Thurs–Sun 9am–6pm; tour timings on demand • Adults R70, under-16s R30; guided tour & entrance adults R100, kids R50 • 021 416 6230, chavonnesbattery.co.za
The Dutch East India Company built this fortification, named after an early-eighteenth century governor of the Cape, to protect Table Bay from their European rivals. Along with the Castle of Good Hope, it was part of a line of fortifications around the bay, built by the Dutch and later used by the British. Rediscovered in the 1990s during the development of the Clock Tower Precinct, the two levels of ruined walls, artefacts and informative displays provide much historical interest. The guided tour is well worth the extra R30.
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA)
Silo District • Under-18s free • 021 418 7855, zeitzmocaa.museum
Occupying a historic grain silo, the ambitious Zeitz MOCAA is the world’s leading museum dedicated to contemporary art from across Africa and its diaspora. Its foundation collection was amassed by the German sustainable business guru and philanthropist Jochen Zeitz, who turned around Puma’s fortunes in the Nineties. At the time of writing, excitement was mounting in advance of the nine-floor, eighty-gallery institution’s opening; the fourteen inaugural exhibitions were set to include spotlights on young artists from Zimbabwe, Angola and Swaziland. Towering 57m above a plaza, the dynamic new addition to Cape Town’s burgeoning cultural scene has regenerated this area of the Waterfront, with new hotels and businesses set to open.
information & getting around: THE V&A Waterfront
Information Waterfront Information Centre at Clock Tower Square (Mon–Fri 8am–5.30pm, Sat & Sun 8.30am–1pm; 086 132 2223, capetown.travel).
By car If you have a car, you’ll find yourself well catered for: there are several multistorey car parks along Dock Rd, which loops around the Waterfront.
By taxi There are a number of taxi ranks dotted about, such as the one next to the V&A Food Market.
By MyCiTi bus 0800 65 64 63, myciti.org.za. This area is well served by public transport. Bus #104 between Sea Point and the Civic Centre has several stops at the Waterfront, including the Two Oceans Aquarium. Service #T01 also runs to the Waterfront from the Civic Centre via Cape Town Stadium. To get to the airport, take a bus or taxi to the Civic Centre and pick up bus #A01 from there.
By sightseeing bus City Sightseeing buses link the Two Oceans Aquarium with a number of major sights in the city centre and on the peninsula (086 173 3287, citysightseeing.co.za).
By bicycle Awol Tours (021 418 3803, awoltours.co.za) rents out bikes from R200 per half-day. Call to arrange pick-up from the Waterfront Information Centre.
Robben Island
Flat and windswept Robben Island, only a few kilometres from the buzz of the Waterfront, is a symbol of the human spirit’s triumph over adversity. Suffused by a meditative silence, this key site of South Africa’s liberation struggle was intended to silence apartheid’s domestic critics, but instead became an international focus for opposition to the regime. From the seventeenth until the late twentieth centuries, it variously served as a prison and leper colony, and as a World War II military base.
Allow more than half a day for the trip, and book as far in advance as possible.
essentials: ROBBEN ISLAND
Getting there The ferry from the Waterfront’s Nelson Mandela Gateway (May–Aug daily 9am, 11am & 1pm; Sept–April daily 9am, 11am, 1pm & 3pm) takes 30min–1hr. Tours are sometimes cancelled due to bad weather or boat problems and refunds are issued, so check ahead.
Tours Visits are by guided tour only, led by former political prisoners who share their experiences. The 4hr tours are of varying quality. After arrival at Murray’s Bay harbour, you go by bus around the island and on foot inside the prison.
Tickets Although a number of vendors sell tickets for cruises that go close to Robben Island, the only ones that will get you onto it (adults R320, under-18s R180, for voyage, entry and tour) are from the Nelson Mandela Gateway. Book in advance; the boats are often full, especially around December and January (021 413 4200, www.robben-island.org.za). For online sales, the website links to webtickets.co.za, which accepts credit and (most) debit cards; you must print out tickets. Although tickets are non-refundable, tours can be rescheduled at least 48hrs in advance.
The bus tour
The bus tour stops at several historical landmarks, including the Moturu Kramat, a shrine built in memory of Sayed Abdurahman Moturu. One of Cape Town’s first imams, the Dutch exiled the Indonesian prince here, where he died in the mid-eighteenth century. The tour passes a leper graveyard and male leper church, built to a Sir Herbert Baker design in 1895. Both are reminders that leprosy sufferers were exiled here, until 1931, when they were relocated to Pretoria, and sadly leprosy is not yet beaten in South Africa.
clockwise from top NELSON MANDELA’S CELL, ROBBEN ISLAND; THE CLOCK TOWER; STREET PERFORMER AT THE WATERFRONT; DE WATERKANT
Robert Sobukwe’s house
Robert Sobukwe’s house is perhaps the most affecting relic of incarceration on the island. It was here that Sobukwe, leader of the Pan Africanist Congress (a radical offshoot of the ANC), was held in solitary confinement for nine years. He was initially sentenced to three years, but was regarded as so dangerous by the authorities that they passed a special law – the “Sobukwe Clause” – to keep him on Robben Island for a further six years. No political prisoners were allowed to speak to him, but he would sometimes gesture his solidarity with other sons of the African soil by letting sand trickle through his fingers as they walked past. After his release in 1969, Sobukwe was restricted to Kimberley under house arrest, until his death from cancer in 1978.
“We Serve with Pride”: the history of Robben Island
Nelson Mandela may have been the most famous Robben Island prisoner, but he wasn’t the first. In the seventeenth century, the island became a place of banishment for those who offended the political order– initially the power belonged to the Dutch, then the British, and finally the apartheid-enforcing National Party. The island’s first prisoner was the indigenous Khoikhoi leader Autshumato, who learnt English in the early seventeenth century and became an emissary of the British. After the Dutch settlement was established, he was jailed by Jan van Riebeeck in 1658. The rest of the seventeenth century saw a succession of East Indies political prisoners and Muslim holy men exiled here for opposing Dutch colonial rule.
During the nineteenth century, the British used Robben Island as a dumping ground for deserters, criminals and political prisoners, in much the same way as they used Australia. Captured Xhosa leaders who defied the British Empire during the Frontier Wars of the early to mid-nineteenth century were transported from the Eastern to the Western Cape to be imprisoned, and many ended up on Robben Island. In 1846 those imprisoned included a whole range of the socially marginalized: vagrants, prostitutes, and the mentally and chronically ill. All were subjected to a regime of brutality and maltreatment, even in the hospitals. In the 1890s, a leper colony numbering hundreds of sufferers existed here too; mentally ill patients were removed in 1921 and the leprosy sufferers in 1930. During World War II, the Defence Force took over the island to guard against a feared Axis invasion, which never came.
Robben Island’s greatest era of notoriety began in 1961, when it was taken over by the Prisons Department, under the control of the National Party government. Prisoners arriving at the island prison were greeted by a slogan on the gate that read: “Welcome to Robben Island: We Serve with Pride.” By 1963, when Nelson Mandela arrived, it had become a maximum-security prison. All the warders – but none of the prisoners – were white. Prisoners were only allowed to send and receive one letter every six months, and common-law criminals and political prisoners were housed together until 1971, when they were separated in an attempt to further isolate the political activists. Harsh conditions, including routine beatings and forced hard labour, were exacerbated by geographical location. There’s nothing but sea between the island and the South Pole, so icy winds routinely blow in from across the Atlantic – and inmates were made to wear shorts and flimsy jerseys. Like every other prisoner, Mandela slept on a thin mat on the floor (until 1973, when he was given a bed because he was ill) and was kept in a solitary confinement cell, measuring two square metres, for sixteen hours a day.
Amazingly, the prisoners found ways of protesting, through hunger strikes, publicizing conditions (using visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross, for example) and, remarkably, by taking legal action against the prison authority to stop arbitrary punishments. They won improved conditions over the years, and the island also became a university behind bars, where people of different generations and political persuasions met; it was not unknown for prisoners to give academic help to their warders.
The last political prisoners were released from Robben Island in 1991 and the remaining common-law prisoners transferred to the mainland in 1996. The following year, the island opened as a museum and national monument, and was declared a World Heritage Site in 1999.
Lime quarry
Another stop is the lime quarry where Mandela and his fellow inmates spent hours of hard labour. The pale stone is extremely bright under the summer sun, which resulted in Mandela and others suffering eye disorders in later years. The quarry eventually became a place of furtive study for the prisoners, with the help of sympathetic warders.
Wildlife spotting
The bus tour also takes in a stretch of coast dotted with shipwrecks and over 130 species of sea bird and waterfowl including the elegant sacred ibis. You may also spot some of the antelope population, including springbok, steenbok, eland and bontebok.
The Maximum Security Prison
The Maximum Security Prison, a forbidding complex of unadorned H-blocks on the island’s eastern edge, is introduced with a tour through the famous B-Section. This small compound, full of tiny rooms, has become legendary in South African history; initially a place of defeat for the resistance movement, it came to incubate and concentrate the energies of liberation. Your ex-inmate guide will likely share their poignant memories of hunger strikes, solitary confinement and hardship alongside the great struggle heroes. Mandela’s cell has been left exactly as it was, without embellishments or display, and the rest are locked and empty.
In the A-Section, the “Cell Stories” exhibition evokes the sparseness of prison life. The tiny isolation cells feature personal artefacts loaned by former prisoners (including a saxophone made of found objects), plus boards bearing quotations and photographs.
Towards the end of the 1980s, cameras were sneaked in here, and inmates took snapshots of each other, which have been mounted as the Smuggled Camera Exhibition in the D-Section communal cells. The prisoners’ jovial demeanour shows they knew that the end was near.
Another interesting part of the prison visit is the Living Legacy tour in F-Section, in which ex-political prisoner guides describe their lives here and answer visitors’ questions.
De Waterkant
An atmospheric central neighbourhood in easy striking distance of the city centre, the Waterfront and the Atlantic seaboard, De Waterkant is a decent place to base yourself. Its terraces, which date back to the mid-eighteenth century, line cobbled streets that climb the lower flanks of Signal Hill. The district plays up its assets for all they’re worth, with many of its houses turned over to guesthouses and self-catering flats. Within easy wandering distance of everything are restaurants, clubs, art dealers and interior design boutiques, many clustered in and around the Cape Quarter, an upmarket shopping mall. With a clutch of gay-friendly nightclubs and pubs on both sides of main drag Somerset Rd, the area is unofficially known as the Pink Village.
Prestwich Memorial
St Andrew’s Sq, cnr Buitengracht St and Somerset Rd • Mon–Fri 8am–6pm, Sat & Sun 8am–1pm • Free • 021 487 2755
The Prestwich Memorial, housed in an elegant modern structure with a facade of Robben Island slate, accommodates 2500 sets of human bones, excavated in 2003, of forgotten and marginalized Capetonians. Many were slaves executed in the vicinity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The interesting interpretation boards provide accounts of burial practices, historic hospitals in the area and, across one wall, a reproduction of a beautiful panorama of Cape Town, painted by Robert Gordon in 1778.
Outside, the Prestwich Memorial Garden exhibits sculptures by homegrown artists, including two mosaic-adorned Rock Girl benches (www.rockgirlsa.org), part of a city-wide scheme to create safe spaces for women and young people. The Walk of Remembrance, created for the 2010 World Cup and renamed from the Fan Walk after Mandela’s death, passes by en route between the train station and Cape Town Stadium. The garden is also at one end of the art and architecture City Walk (capetownbig7.co.za) to/from the Company’s Garden; this route can be explored at your own pace, with plenty of pointers on the website, or on a free guided walking tour.
getting around: de waterkant
By car Street parking can be hard to come by; the easiest place to find a spot is the Cape Quarter mall, entered from Napier and Dixon streets.