Pretoria keeps its culture in layers: a 1964 modernist art museum in Arcadia Park, Mapungubwe's 13th-century gold suspended over Lynnwood Road, and township heritage routes east and west of the CBD. Three days covers all three.
Gerard Moerdijk's 1949 granite cube rises 40m above a domed Hall of Heroes, where a 92m marble frieze — the world's longest bas-relief — wraps the interior. A light shaft strikes the Cenotaph at noon on 16 December. Open 08:00–17:00.
Arcadia Park's 1964 modernist box holds the city collection — Pierneef landscapes, Irma Stern portraits and Gerard Sekoto's township work — plus rotating shows of contemporary Gauteng artists. Tue–Sun 10:00–17:00, closed Mondays.
The Javett bridges Lynnwood Road on a steel span. The Mapungubwe gold collection, including the 13th-century gold rhino, sits in a vault gallery below; changing African contemporary exhibitions fill the bridge above. Wed–Sun 10:00–17:00.
A member-run gallery in a Nieuw Muckleneuk house showing roughly twenty exhibitions a year of Pretoria painters, printmakers and ceramicists. Work is hung for buying rather than browsing, with prices from a few hundred rand upward.
On Salvokop hill, the //hapo museum tells 3.6 billion years of southern African story through boulder-shaped galleries, while the Wall of Names — over 130,000 of the fallen — curves past the Isivivane resting place of stones.
An 1886 Victorian villa where the Treaty of Vereeniging ended the Anglo-Boer War in May 1902. The signing table still stands in the dining room beneath stained glass and original plasterwork. Tue–Sun 10:00–17:00, R30 entry.
The old Africana Museum on Visagie Street keeps Mapungubwe-era ceramics, Ndebele beadwork panels, San rock art lifted from the Drakensberg and a Tsonga and Venda instrument collection across two floors. Daily 08:00–16:00.
Six stages on Pretorius Street programme Setswana and isiZulu drama, jazz seasons and the Mzansi Fela festival each September. The Opera house seats around 1,300 and the smaller Momentum stage carries new writing.
The Indian and Black quarter west of the CBD that survived partial forced removal: the 1905 Miriammen Temple with its painted gopuram, the shell of the Empire Theatre, and the trading shopfronts along Boom and Grand Street.
A restored Victorian brickyard off Prospect Street turned into a courtyard of working ateliers — a bookbinder, a printmaker, ceramic studios and a coffee roaster — arranged under old jacarandas around a cobbled quadrangle.
East of the city, the route links Solomon Mahlangu Square, Mamelodi Freedom Square and the house of Dr Ribeiro, with stops at the shebeens where the township's jazz and marabi scene grew through the 1960s and 70s.
A warehouse venue in Rietfontein with an outdoor stage, retro arcade cabinets indoors and a Pretoria-heavy line-up of rock, metal, punk and local hip-hop most Friday and Saturday nights. Doors from about 19:00.