Johannesburg's story runs from 2-million-year-old skulls in the Cradle dolomite to Iron Age furnaces, the 1886 gold rush that built Ferreirasdorp, and the Soweto streets where the 1976 uprising began.
Flagship museum of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, 50km northwest of the city. An underground boat ride through fire, water, air and earth opens into halls of hominin fossils and casts of Mrs Ples. Open 09:00–17:00 daily.
Robert Broom prised the 2.1-million-year-old Mrs Ples skull from this dolomite in 1947; the near-complete Little Foot skeleton followed in 1994. Guided tours leave every half hour, descending 60m past an underground lake.
Southern Africa's museum of San rock art and symbolic thought, on the Wits campus in Braamfontein. Ochre pigments, 120,000-year-old engravings, Wilhelm Bleek's 1870s |xam language notebooks and a hall of reproduced painted panels.
Johannesburg's oldest declared heritage site: a quartzite ridge holding a reconstructed Iron Age smelting furnace used by Tswana-speaking farmers around 1600, alongside Stone Age tool scatters and pre-mining grassland.
Descend 226m down Crown Mines Shaft 14, sunk in 1897, where guides walk you past drilling faces, cramped stopes and a gold pour that casts a bar in front of you. Hard hats issued at the headgear.
A half-kilometre pedestrian mall through the ground where the 1886 tent camp stood. Anglo American's headquarters, the 1903 Corner House, bronze ore trucks and the old Rand Mines offices line the walk down to Marshalltown.
The 1913 fruit market rebuilt as the city museum: a walk-through Sophiatown shack reconstruction, Treason Trial material, San rock art and the Bensusan photography collection. The Workers' Museum alongside preserves a 1913 municipal compound.
Founded in 1887 by Cecil Rhodes for the mining magnates, the 1904 building keeps Africa's longest mahogany bar, a Randlord portrait gallery and a cantilevered spiral staircase under stained glass.
Built two blocks from where Sam Nzima photographed 13-year-old Hector Pieterson dying on 16 June 1976. Testimony, police radio recordings, footage of the Afrikaans-medium protest and a wall of the uprising's dead.
The four-room matchbox house Nelson Mandela moved into in 1946 and returned to for eleven days in 1990, still showing bullet marks and petrol-bomb scorching on the brickwork. Desmond Tutu lived down the same street.
South Africa's largest Catholic church and the refuge students fled into in June 1976 — police fired inside, and the bullet holes remain in the ceiling and the marble altar. It later hosted Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.
From 1955 some 65,000 residents were bulldozed out of this freehold suburb and it was renamed Triomf. The centre on Toby Street holds the removal archive; the Church of Christ the King, where Huddleston preached, still stands.