Bo-Kaap

Where it sits. Bo-Kaap — "above the Cape" in Afrikaans — climbs the lower slopes of Signal Hill directly above Cape Town's central business district, separated from it by the traffic canyon of Buitengracht Street. Its streets run steeply uphill in a tight grid: Wale, Dorp, Chiappini, Rose, Longmarket and Leeuwen, several still cobbled, with flat-fronted terraced houses standing shoulder to shoulder and their stoeps opening straight onto the pavement. From the upper corners you look back over the city bowl to the harbour and, turning, up to the sheer face of Table Mountain and Lion's Head. It is small enough to walk end to end in twenty minutes and steep enough that this takes effort.

The story behind it. In 1760 Jan de Waal bought a block of land at the foot of Signal Hill between Dorp and Wale streets, and from 1763 he built rows of small huurhuisjes — rental houses — which he leased to the people he had enslaved. Those first houses still stand, including the one at 71 Wale Street. The community that formed here traces its origins to people brought to the Cape under Dutch rule from the Indonesian archipelago, the Malay peninsula, South Asia and East Africa, which produced both the old name Malay Quarter and the Cape Malay culture that remains the quarter's identity. The Auwal Mosque, established in Dorp Street in 1794, is South Africa's oldest; the Tana Baru burial ground above the quarter was laid out in 1804. Under apartheid the area escaped the bulldozers that erased District Six, but not the Group Areas Act: residents who were not classified Malay were forcibly removed, a "preservation" of the quarter's character imposed by the state official I. D. du Plessis that hollowed out a genuinely mixed neighbourhood.

About those colours. The painted façades are the reason most people come and they are not old. Under de Waal's leases the houses had to be kept white; the bright greens, pinks, cobalts and citrus yellows are a practice of the late twentieth century, taken up by residents once they owned their homes, and read locally as an assertion of ownership after generations of tenancy. The result is now the most photographed residential street scene in Africa, which has brought its own problem: property prices have risen sharply since the end of apartheid, short-let conversions have displaced families, and residents have protested against development and against tour groups treating doorsteps as a set. Parts of the quarter received formal heritage protection at the end of the 2010s.

On screen and in the frame. Cape Town carries one of the largest location industries in the southern hemisphere, sustained by the studio complex at Faure and by a summer that falls in the northern hemisphere's winter, and Bo-Kaap's stepped blocks of colour are the shot that says "Cape Town" in a second. The quarter turns up constantly in commercials, music videos, fashion shoots and the establishing sequences of productions based in the city, and in documentary work on Cape Malay history and cuisine. What it is not is a set: people live in these houses, the mosques are working mosques with five daily calls to prayer, and the ordinary courtesy is to ask before photographing a person, a doorway or a family's stoep.

What you actually see today. The Bo-Kaap Museum occupies the 1760s house at 71 Wale Street, the oldest in the area still in its original form, distinguished by its voorstoep — a raised front terrace with a bench at each end — and furnished to show the life of a prosperous nineteenth-century Cape Muslim family, with photographs of the quarter through the twentieth century. Small bakeries and home kitchens sell koesisters, the spiced, syrup-soaked and coconut-rolled doughnut eaten on Sunday mornings and quite distinct from the Afrikaans koeksister. Cooking classes run out of private houses. Above the quarter on Signal Hill, the Noon Gun has been fired at midday since the early nineteenth century from cannon cast in 1794, audible across the city bowl and startling from close range. Higher again, the Tana Baru cemetery holds the graves of several early imams whose shrines form part of the ring of kramats around the Cape, still visited by Muslim families as a circuit.

Getting there and timing. The quarter is a ten-minute uphill walk from Greenmarket Square and the Company's Garden, or a short ride on the MyCiTi bus network. The east-facing façades take the light in the morning, which is the best hour for both photographs and temperature. October to April is warm and dry, with the south-easter blowing hard some afternoons. Street parking is residential and scarce, the cobbles are uneven, and the gradients are steep enough to be difficult for wheeled users.