Explore Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula
Away from Table Mountain and the city centre, the bulk of Cape Town’s residential sprawl extends east into South Africa’s interior. It’s here that the southern suburbs, the formerly whites-only residential areas, stretch out down the east side of Table Mountain, ending at Muizenberg on the False Bay coast, with Claremont and Newlands acting as the central pivotal point.
From anywhere in the southern suburbs you can see Table Mountain. The area offers some quick escapes from the city into forests, gardens and vineyards, all hugging the eastern slopes of the mountain and its extension, the Constantiaberg. The quickest way of reaching the southern suburbs from the city centre, Waterfront or City Bowl suburbs is the M3 highway. Alternatively, you can travel by train to Woodstock, Salt River, Observatory, Mowbray, Rosebank and Rondebosch, and all the stations southwards to Fish Hoek and Simon’s Town.
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Cape Dutch architecture
Cape Dutch architecture
Cape Dutch style, which developed in the Western Cape countryside from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, is so rooted in the Winelands that it has become an integral element of the landscape. Limewashed walls glisten in glowing green vineyards, while thatched roofs and curvilinear gables mirror the undulations of the surrounding mountains. The signature element of Cape Dutch manors is their central gables set into the long side of the roof. Gables became more and more elaborate and became an expression of wealth and status.
In central Cape Town, the gable only survived until the 1830s, to be replaced by buildings with flush facades and flat roofs – a response to a series of great fires in Cape Town and Stellenbosch. With pitched roofs gone, the urban gable withered away, surviving symbolically in some instances as minimal roof decoration; an example of this is the wavy parapet on the Bo-Kaap Museum (1763–68) in Wale Street.
