The Most Beautiful Places in South Africa
15 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in South Africa are Cape of Good Hope, Table Mountain and Big Hole. The list covers 15 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
South Africa's scenery is built from some of the oldest exposed rock on Earth. Ancient sandstones form the flat summit of Table Mountain and the folded ranges of the Cape, the Great Escarpment drops from the interior plateau in cliffs such as the Drakensberg, and volcanic pipes far older than the dinosaurs carried diamonds to the surface. Two oceans meeting at the continent's tip, and a history that runs from the Zulu kingdom to the mining boom, add the rest.
At the end of the Cape Peninsula, the Cape of Good Hope ends in sheer cliffs above the Atlantic, while Table Mountain, often covered by its famous tablecloth of cloud, rises behind Cape Town with Kirstenbosch, one of the great botanical gardens of the world, on its eastern slopes. On the shore at Simon's Town, Boulders Beach is home to a colony of African penguins among granite boulders, and in the city's harbour a converted grain silo now houses the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.
Inland, the Big Hole at Kimberley is one of the largest holes ever dug by hand, a relic of the diamond rush that began in 1871. The Orange River plunges into a granite gorge at Augrabies Falls, and Tugela Falls in the Drakensberg is among the tallest waterfalls in the world. Blyde River Canyon cuts deep into the escarpment beneath the Three Rondavels, and the Cango Caves near Oudtshoorn hold chambers of dripstone. Sani Pass climbs in hairpins toward Lesotho, and Isandlwana recalls the battle of 1879 in the Anglo-Zulu War.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cape of Good Hope | Cliff | |
| 2 | Table Mountain | Mountain | |
| 3 | Big Hole | Mine | |
| 4 | Augrabies Falls | Waterfall | |
| 5 | Tugela Falls | Waterfall | |
| 6 | Blyde River Canyon | Canyon | |
| 7 | Cango Caves | Show cave | |
| 8 | Boulders Beach | Beach | |
| 9 | Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden | Botanical garden | |
| 10 | Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa | Museum | |
| 11 | Isandlwana Battlefield | Battlefield | |
| 12 | Sani Pass | Mountain pass | |
| 13 | Hole-in-the-Wall, Eastern Cape | Natural arch | |
| 14 | Amphitheatre (Drakensberg) | Cliff | |
| 15 | Table Mountain Aerial Cableway | Aerial tramway |
01 Cape of Good Hope
South Africa34.358° S 18.472° E
Image by sharonang from Pixabay At the end of the Cape Peninsula, a ridge of Table Mountain sandstone drops into the Atlantic in a jumble of dark rock and surf.
Did you know? The meeting point of the warm Agulhas Current and the cold Benguela Current shifts back and forth between Cape Agulhas and Cape Point.
02 Table Mountain
South Africa · 5.2 km from Cape Town33.962° S 18.414° E
Image by martinaH79 from Pixabay Table Mountain is the flat-topped sandstone wall behind Cape Town, a plateau about three kilometres across edged by cliffs and flanked by Devil's Peak to the east and Lion's Head to the west. Its highest point, Maclear's Beacon at 1,086 m, is a stone cairn built for a survey in 1865.
Did you know? A steam locomotive used during the dam building on the summit plateau is preserved in a small waterworks museum up there.
03 Big Hole
South Africa · 1.4 km from Kimberley28.739° S 24.759° E
Irene2005 · CC BY 2.0 The Big Hole in Kimberley is what remains of one of the great rushes of the nineteenth century. In 1871 diamonds were found on a small hill, Colesberg Kopje, on the farm of the De Beer brothers, and within weeks the hill was carved into hundreds of claims.
Did you know? The diamond-bearing rock kimberlite takes its name from this town and its pipes.
04 Augrabies Falls
South Africa28.591° S 20.341° E
Christian Wörtz ( woertz ) · CC BY-SA 2.5 At Augrabies the Orange River, the largest river in South Africa, gathers itself and drops about 56 metres in a thundering cascade into a narrow granite chasm. The Khoikhoi called the place Ankoerebis, "place of great noise", and the name was later reshaped by Trek Boers into Augrabies.
Did you know? Early 20th-century prospectors believed the pool beneath the falls was full of diamonds washed down the Orange River, a river with many alluvial diamond deposits.
05 Tugela Falls
South Africa28.752° S 28.894° E
Andynct · CC BY-SA 4.0 The single leap most people mean when they talk about Tugela is 411 metres — taller than most entire waterfalls anywhere else — and it's only the top tier of a five-stage cascade off the Amphitheatre, the sheer wall of the northern Drakensberg, that adds up to somewhere between 947 and 983 metres depending on whose…
Did you know? The plateau above the falls was named Mont-aux-Sources, the mountain of springs, by French missionaries in 1836.
06 Blyde River Canyon
South Africa24.564° S 30.808° E
Image by manfredrichter from Pixabay The Blyde River Canyon cuts some 26 km through the edge of the Drakensberg escarpment in Mpumalanga, and it is usually ranked the third-largest canyon on Earth after the Grand Canyon and the Fish River Canyon.
Did you know? Every non-human primate native to South Africa lives in the canyon, including both bushbabies, vervet monkeys and the samango monkey.
07 Cango Caves
South Africa · 20.9 km from Oudtshoorn33.393° S 22.215° E
Image by AlkeMade from Pixabay The Cango Caves open into the foothills of the Swartberg range in South Africa's Little Karoo, a sequence of underground halls hung with stalactites, columns and flowstone formed in ancient Precambrian limestone.
Did you know? At the far end of Cango II, a 20-metre shaft drops into a flooded chamber whose water flows back toward Cango I.
08 Boulders Beach
South Africa · 31 km from Cape Town34.197° S 18.451° E
Image by Jeanine_S from Pixabay Boulders Beach is a small chain of coves on the False Bay shore of the Cape Peninsula, just south of the naval town of Simon's Town, and it owes its name and its look to the stone.
Did you know? The birds nest in burrows or in hollows of sand sheltered beneath boulders and bushes, laying two eggs that take about 40 days to hatch.
09 Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden
South Africa · 7.7 km from Cape Town33.987° S 18.433° E
Image by jeanvdmeulen from Pixabay Kirstenbosch exists because Cecil Rhodes liked the view.
Did you know? When the garden began in 1913 the land was overgrown, overrun by weeds and roamed by wild pigs feeding on fallen acorns.
10 Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa
South Africa · 1.4 km from Cape Town33.908° S 18.423° E
Matti Blume · CC BY-SA 4.0 Inside a 1920s grain silo on Cape Town's harbour front, a cluster of 42 tightly packed concrete tubes has been sliced open to form a soaring atrium, its curved walls cut cleanly through so that the circular sections of the old cylinders show like the cross-section of a honeycomb.
Did you know? Workers used diamond rope saws, twin-blade saws and a one-metre circular saw, cutting roughly a kilometre of concrete, guided by GPS and laser positioning.
11 Isandlwana Battlefield
Isandlwana
South Africa28.359° S 30.653° E
No machine-readable author provided. RAM assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain Isandlwana is a solitary hill rising out of the open grassland of KwaZulu-Natal, and at its foot, on 22 January 1879, a British invasion force suffered one of the worst defeats in the history of the Victorian army.
Did you know? Only five imperial officers survived the battle, among them Horace Smith-Dorrien, who later became a general in the First World War.
12 Sani Pass
South Africa · 39 km from Mokhotlong29.588° S 29.293° E
Vaiz Ha · CC BY 2.0 Seen from above, the Sani Pass looks like a child's scribble on the face of the Drakensberg: a thin gravel line that zigzags straight up the escarpment between walls of basalt.
Did you know? The pass crosses the Great Escarpment of southern Africa at its highest section, where the Drakensberg rises above 3,000 metres.
13 Hole-in-the-Wall, Eastern Cape
South Africa32.041° S 29.109° E
Vincentvanoosten · CC0 On the Wild Coast of South Africa's Eastern Cape, a short way south of the village of Coffee Bay, a great slab of rock stands detached from the mainland just off the beach, and straight through its middle runs an opening big enough to sail a small boat through. This is Hole-in-the-Wall.
Did you know? Sixteen helicopters, most of them South African Air Force Pumas, winched passengers off the listing Oceanos so that all 571 on board survived.
14 Amphitheatre (Drakensberg)
Amphitheatre
South Africa28.761° S 28.919° E
Pavel Špindler · CC BY 3.0 The Amphitheatre is the northern Drakensberg's great wall: a curved rampart of rock more than five kilometres long, rising in sheer cliffs about 1,200 metres high, with its rim above 3,000 metres.
Did you know? The plateau above the wall is a sheet of basalt lying at an average of around 3,050 metres.
15 Table Mountain Aerial Cableway
South Africa · 4.8 km from Cape Town33.953° S 18.403° E
Fazielah Williams · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Table Mountain Aerial Cableway carries visitors from the lower slopes of Cape Town's great flat-topped mountain to its summit plateau in about five minutes, and for nearly a century it has been the easiest way to stand on one of the most famous skylines in the world.
Did you know? The original wood-and-steel cars carried 25 passengers; they were upgraded in 1958, 1974 and 1997.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in South Africa?
- On our list, Cape of Good Hope ranks first, followed by Table Mountain and Big Hole.
- Is the Cape of Good Hope the southernmost point of Africa?
- No. The southernmost point of Africa is Cape Agulhas, about 150 kilometres to the south-east. The Cape of Good Hope is the most south-westerly point of the continent and was a landmark for sailors rounding Africa.
- Why is Table Mountain flat on top?
- Its summit is a layer of hard, erosion-resistant sandstone lying almost horizontally over softer rock. Over hundreds of millions of years the surrounding land wore away, leaving a level plateau about three kilometres long.
- Was the Big Hole in Kimberley dug by hand?
- Largely, yes. Thousands of miners worked the diamond-bearing kimberlite pipe with picks and shovels from 1871 until 1914, removing enormous quantities of earth and recovering about 2,700 kilograms of diamonds.
- What kinds of places are there to see in South Africa?
- In our collection, the places in South Africa are most often cliffs (2), waterfalls (2), mountains (1) and canyons and gorges (1).
- How many places are on this list in South Africa?
- The list covers 15 places.