Cape Town keeps its history in layers: a Dutch pentagon fort, an auction square where people were sold, a balcony where Mandela spoke in 1990, and a township laid out in 1927. Three days walking those layers in order.
South Africa's oldest surviving colonial building, a pentagonal VOC bastion completed in 1679 on what was then the shoreline. Open 09:00–17:00 daily; catch the 10:00 key ceremony and the Dolphin Pool tour beneath the ramparts.
Built in 1679 to hold the VOC's enslaved people, later the Supreme Court. The permanent 'From Human Wrongs to Human Rights' galleries name the enslaved and trace the trade routes from Madagascar, Bengal and Mozambique to Table Bay.
Founded 1825, the country's oldest museum, reached through the Company's Garden that Jan van Riebeeck planted in 1652 as a VOC vegetable larder. The rock-art gallery holds San and /Xam paintings lifted whole from the Cederberg.
Granite blocks in the square mark where enslaved people were auctioned under a pine until 1834. Groote Kerk alongside, consecrated 1704 and rebuilt in 1841, keeps Anton Anreith's carved pulpit held up by two lions.
Housed in the old Buitenkant Methodist church, it records the 1966 declaration that flattened District Six and displaced 60,000 people. The floor map is annotated in pen by former residents naming their own streets and houses.
The Edwardian 1905 City Hall balcony where Nelson Mandela addressed the crowd hours after his release on 11 February 1990. The Parade below is the city's oldest public space, laid out in 1697 as a Dutch military drilling ground.
At 88 Hatfield Street the 1863 Old Synagogue, the first in South Africa, opens into galleries on Lithuanian migration to the Cape. The adjoining Holocaust & Genocide Centre draws the line from Nazi racial law to apartheid statute.
The Dutch signal post that flagged ships in Table Bay from 1743. The battery below still fires the Noon Gun, cast in 1794 and the oldest gun in daily use anywhere. From the ridge you look straight out at Robben Island.
Auwal on Dorp Street, founded in 1794 by Tuan Guru, is South Africa's first mosque; he wrote the Qur'an out from memory while imprisoned on Robben Island. The Bo-Kaap Museum at 71 Wale Street fills a 1760s house.
South Africa's oldest Muslim burial ground, opened in 1805 at the top of Longmarket Street and closed by decree in 1886, which set off the Tana Baru riots. Tuan Guru's kramat here anchors the Cape's circle of shrines.
Laid out in 1927 under the Urban Areas Act, Langa is Cape Town's oldest township, named for the chief Langalibalele. The old pass office on Washington Street is now a museum of the dompas system, next to the Guga S'thebe centre.
A 1780s townhouse bought in 1807 by the freed slave Jan van Boughies and turned into the Cape's second-oldest working mosque, still marked by the palm he planted at the door. The Victorian cast-iron balconies along Long date from the 1880s.