Cape of Good Hope
Interesting facts
- Herodotus doubted Phoenician sailors who claimed to have rounded Africa around 600 BC with the sun on their right, the very detail that now makes their voyage plausible.
- Fra Mauro's world map of about 1450 already showed the Indian Ocean open to the Atlantic, labelling the tip of Africa the Cape of Diab.
- In 1512 Afonso de Albuquerque sent King Manuel I a chart traced from a Javanese pilot's map which, he wrote, already showed the Cape of Good Hope.
- The meeting point of the warm Agulhas Current and the cold Benguela Current shifts back and forth between Cape Agulhas and Cape Point.
- Because the water temperatures differ so much, sea life west of Cape Point is noticeably different from that found to the east.
- The reserve protects about 1,100 indigenous plant species, including up to 24 members of the protea family.
- At least 250 bird species have been recorded around the cape, from seabirds to nectar-feeding sunbirds and sugarbirds.
- Garden favourites such as pelargoniums, freesias and many irises and lilies originally come from fynbos vegetation like that on the cape.
- Fresh supplies at the Dutch station on Table Bay were so vital to ships rounding the cape that Cape Town became known as the Tavern of the Seas.
- A black-maned lion described from the Cape in 1842, later called the Cape lion, has long since vanished from the wild.
Why it is worth it
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. The Cape of Good Hope is not, despite its fame, the southernmost point of Africa – that is Cape Agulhas, some 150 km to the east-southeast – but for ships following the west coast of the continent south from the equator it is the point where the course finally begins to turn east. That made it the symbolic gateway between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and for centuries sailors have called it simply "the Cape". Cape Point, with its higher cliffs, rises a little over two kilometres to the east-southeast.
The first European known to reach it was the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias in 1488. He named it the Cape of Storms; King John II of Portugal is said to have renamed it the Cape of Good Hope for the promise it held of a sea route to India, a promise Vasco da Gama fulfilled a decade later. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company set up a supply station on Table Bay, about 50 km to the north, which grew into Cape Town. Two Portuguese navigation beacons, the Dias Cross and the da Gama Cross, commemorate the explorers; lined up, they point to a submerged rock in False Bay. Sailors' lore made these waters the home of the Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship that, the legend goes, is condemned to beat against the wind forever without ever rounding the headland.
The headland lies within the Cape of Good Hope section of Table Mountain National Park, a wild strip of coast clothed in fynbos – the heathland of the Cape Floral Kingdom, the smallest and richest of the world's floral kingdoms, here represented by proteas, ericas and reed-like restios. Bontebok, eland and ostriches graze the coastal flats, chacma baboons forage on the shore, including for shellfish, and from June to November southern right whales are often seen offshore in False Bay.
Getting there
The Cape of Good Hope lies about 50 km south of Cape Town and some 29 km from Muizenberg on the shore of False Bay. The nearest airport is Cape Town International Airport (CPT), about 44 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Boulders Beach 18.0 km · beach
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Cape of Good Hope is a rocky headland on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa.
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