Table Mountain

Interesting facts

Table Mountain is the only landform on Earth to have a constellation named after it: Mensa, "the Table", coined by the French astronomer Nicolas de Lacaille in the 1750s.

The Table Mountain ghost frog lives nowhere in the world except the streams of this one mountain.

Five reservoirs were built on the Back Table between 1896 and 1907 to supply Cape Town, including the Woodhead and Hely-Hutchinson dams.

A steam locomotive used during the dam building on the summit plateau is preserved in a small waterworks museum up there.

British forces built three blockhouses on the slopes in 1796; the King's Blockhouse still stands in good condition while the other two are ruins.

The Wynberg Caves on the Back Table are a rarity: sizeable caves carved into sandstone rather than the usual limestone.

Beneath the grey sandstone cliffs runs the Graafwater Formation, a band of maroon mudstones about 70 metres thick.

The whole mountain rests on Cape granite, which forced its way into even older, heavily folded Malmesbury shales still exposed below Devil's Peak.

The rotating cable cars introduced in 1997 carry 65 passengers per trip, more than three times as many as the old cabins.

Why it is worth it

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. The Khoekhoe called the mountain Huriǂoaxa, "rising from the sea"; the Portuguese navigator António de Saldanha, who climbed it in 1503 by Platteklip Gorge, named it the Table of the Cape. When the south-easterly wind pushes moist air up its slopes, a sheet of cloud — the "tablecloth" — spills over the edge; local legend attributes it to a smoking contest between the Devil and a pirate named Van Hunks.

The flat top is a geological inversion: the mountain is a syncline, the floor of an ancient fold, protected by a very hard layer of quartzitic Table Mountain Sandstone over 450 million years old, while the softer rock around it wore away. What grows on it is extraordinary. About 1,500 plant species occur on the 57 km² of Table Mountain and the Back Table — roughly as many as in the whole of the United Kingdom — most of them fynbos, and the area is part of the Cape Floral Region World Heritage Site. From January to March the red Disa uniflora orchid flowers beside streams on the Back Table.

Most visitors ride the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway, opened in 1929 and rebuilt in 1997 with rotating Rotair cabins that turn a full circle on the way, from Tafelberg Road to the upper station at 1,067 m. From the top you look down on the City Bowl, Table Bay and Robben Island, and along the Atlantic seaboard. Walkers take Platteklip Gorge, the direct route — about two and a half hours, steep and shadeless — or the longer Skeleton Gorge and Nursery Ravine from Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden. Table Mountain National Park is the most visited in South Africa, and in 2011 the mountain was named one of the New7Wonders of Nature.

Getting there

The mountain rises directly above central Cape Town, about 4 km away. Cape Town International Airport (CPT) is about 18 km off. The lower cable station is on Tafelberg Road. Platteklip Gorge starts from the same road.

Table Mountain

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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