🇿🇦 South Africa
Cape Town
Cape Town (Kaapstad in Afrikaans, iKapa in Xhosa — population 4.6 million in the City of Cape Town metro — the legislative capital of South Africa, the second-most populated city after Johannesburg, and by nearly universal agreement the most beautiful city in Africa and one of the most beautiful cities in the world) sits at the southwestern tip of the African continent between two oceans (the Atlantic and the Indian), beneath the extraordinary geological monument of Table Mountain (the flat-topped sandstone plateau, 1,086m above sea level, that overlooks the city and was the first landmark sighted by the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias when he rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488). Cape Town's character is shaped by the convergence of extraordinary natural geography (the mountain, the two oceans, the Cape Floral Kingdom (the smallest and most biodiverse of the world's six floral kingdoms, with 9,600 plant species in an area the size of Portugal, 70% of which are endemic)), the extremity of South Africa's historical divisions (the Cape was the site of the first European settlement in sub-Saharan Africa (the Dutch East India Company (VOC) refreshment post of Jan van Riebeeck, 1652), the original point of entry of the Dutch and British settlers whose descendants became the Afrikaner people, and the location of Robben Island (the prison island in Table Bay where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment (1964–1982 — moved to Pollsmoor Prison in 1982))), and the extraordinary culinary diversity of the Cape Malay cuisine (the cooking of the enslaved people brought to the Cape from Malaysia, Indonesia, India and East Africa by the VOC — the Cape Malay curry, the boboties, the koesisters and the Malay pickles are the most distinctive and historically significant food tradition in South Africa).