A country · 290 places · 9 regions
South Africa, all of it.
290 curated places across 9 regions — photographed, mapped, and noted with the season each is best in.
The 4 biggest regions — Western Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape — read below as chapters, with 5 more waiting past them.
Chapter I · Western Cape · 104 places
Western Cape
Table Mountain is the flat-topped sandstone block that closes the southern side of Cape Town's city bowl, its plateau running roughly three kilometres from the cable station in the west to the high point in the east. That high point is Maclear's Beacon at 1,086 metres, marked by a stone cairn built in 1865 by Sir Thomas Maclear for the trigonometrical survey of the meridian arc, and it stands about 19 metres above the upper cable station at the other end of the table. The mountain is the northern end of a sandstone range that forms the spine of the Cape Peninsula and runs 50 km south to Cape Point, with Devil's Peak to the east and Lion's Head to the north-west closing the amphitheatre in which the city sits. What it is made of. The cliffs are hard quartzitic Peninsula Formation sandstone, extremely resistant to erosion, which is why the crags are grey, steep and squared off. Beneath them lies a 70-metre band of maroon Graafwater mudstone laid down in fine horizontal beds, and beneath that the Cape Granite that forms the lower slopes. Softer layers above the sandstone eroded away entirely, leaving the flat quartzite platform that gives the mountain its name and its silhouette. The mountain also carries something geologically unusual: extensive cave systems developed in sandstone rather than limestone, several kilometres of them, mapped by cavers on the back table. The famous "tablecloth" forms when the summer south-easter drives moist air up the eastern face, condenses it at the rim and spills it over the northern edge, where it evaporates as it descends — a standing wave of cloud that can sit for a day. What grows and lives there. The mountain carries 2,285 plant species, around four-fifths of them fynbos, most in the endangered Peninsula Sandstone Fynbos type, with patches of critically endangered Peninsula Granite Fynbos, renosterveld and Afromontane forest in the wetter ravines; the whole forms part of the Cape Floral Region World Heritage Site. Fynbos is fire-adapted and requires burning at intervals to regenerate, which makes the summer fires on the slopes both a hazard to property and a necessary part of the cycle. The showy red disa flowers in the wet gorges from January to March. Rock hyrax — dassies — are the mammal visitors actually see, sunning themselves on the upper rocks; Verreaux's eagles have historically nested on the peninsula and hunt them. Getting to the top. Platteklip Gorge splits the front face and gives the most direct route up: relentless stone steps, two to three hours, almost no shade, and the line taken by António de Saldanha in 1503 on the first recorded ascent by a European. Skeleton Gorge from Kirstenbosch climbs through forest and ladders to the back table on the Smuts Track, named for Jan Smuts, who walked it regularly. India Venster is a scrambling route with real exposure and no business being attempted casually. The alternative is the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway: the contract went to Adolf Bleichert & Co. of Leipzig in 1926 and the line opened on 4 October 1929, running from the lower station on Tafelberg Road at 302 metres to the plateau at 1,067 metres. It has been refurbished three times, and the current cars rotate through a full turn during the ascent so every passenger gets every view. On screen. The mountain is the establishing shot that says Cape Town and it almost never plays anywhere else — the profile is too recognisable to double. What matters for film here is the mountain's role in the wider ecology of a city that has become one of the busiest location markets in the southern hemisphere: within an hour of the summit are dune fields, wine valleys, Atlantic and Indian Ocean coastlines, colonial townscape and pine forest, and the southern summer delivers long daylight while Europe and North America are dark. That compressed variety, more than any single landmark, is what keeps crews here from October to March. Getting there and timing. Tafelberg Road is a ten-minute drive or a steep walk from the city centre, with a shuttle from the lower cableway station and heavy parking pressure in season. The cableway closes for high wind at short notice and shuts entirely for about two weeks of maintenance each winter, so a plan that depends on it needs a fallback. February to May offers the most settled weather; the south-easter blows hardest from November to February. Conditions on top change fast, the summit can be fifteen degrees colder than the waterfront, and walking down after dark is the most common way people get into trouble here.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter II · Gauteng · 41 places
Gauteng
Soweto is the sprawling township southwest of Johannesburg that became synonymous with the anti-apartheid struggle, most notably through the 1976 Soweto Uprising. Vilakazi Street is the only street in the world to have housed two Nobel Peace Prize laureates — Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. The Hector Pieterson Museum documents the uprising, and the Orlando Towers cooling chimneys serve as a graphic landmark of the township's industrial heritage.
✦ May to September · $
Chapter III · KwaZulu-Natal · 41 places
KwaZulu-Natal
The Drakensberg escarpment forms the highest mountain range in southern Africa, its basalt peaks reaching 3,482 metres at Thabana Ntlenyana on the Lesotho border. The uKhahlamba-Drakensberg Park protects thousands of San rock art sites alongside alpine grasslands and endemic species. Dramatic cliff faces such as the Amphitheatre in the Royal Natal section offer some of the continent's most spectacular mountain photography.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter IV · Eastern Cape · 20 places
Eastern Cape
Addo Elephant National Park near Port Elizabeth holds the world's highest density of African elephants, with a population exceeding 600 individuals across its malaria-free reserve. The park's dense Eastern Cape thicket vegetation makes wildlife watching at waterholes particularly productive, and the park also harbours lion, black rhino, buffalo, and spotted hyena. An offshore marine section protects great white sharks and breeding colonies of Cape gannets.
✦ May to September · $$
Regions of South Africa
Every place in South Africa
