Explore South Africa

Cape Town

Backed by the flat-topped mass of Table Mountain and lapped by two oceans, Cape Town consistently ranks among the world's most beautiful cities. The V&A Waterfront, Boulders Beach penguins, Cape Point's vertiginous sea cliffs, and the Winelands rolling just east make it a destination that routinely runs out of superlatives.

Johannesburg

The economic engine of sub-Saharan Africa, Johannesburg is the world's largest city built without a navigable river or coastline. The Apartheid Museum delivers one of the most powerful historical experiences on the continent, while the creative Maboneng neighbourhood and Soweto's Vilakazi Street — the only road in the world to have housed two Nobel Peace Prize winners — show a city transforming at pace.

Durban

South Africa's third city faces the warm Indian Ocean with year-round sunshine and some of the country's best beach weather. The Golden Mile promenade, uShaka Marine World, and an extraordinary layered Indian-Zulu food culture — including the city's invention, bunny chow — make Durban one of Africa's most distinctive and underrated urban experiences.

Stellenbosch

The heart of the Cape Winelands spreads across a valley framed by rugged granite mountains, its oak-lined streets flanked by centuries-old Cape Dutch homesteads. More than 150 wine estates producing world-class Chenin Blanc, Pinotage, and Cabernet are within a short drive of a vibrant university town and some of South Africa's finest restaurants.

Knysna

Perched between ancient indigenous forest and a sweeping lagoon, Knysna is the Garden Route's jewel — famous for the twin sandstone cliffs of The Heads guarding its tidal entrance and the oysters harvested from its protected waters. Forest elephants, houseboats, and the hiking trails of Garden Route National Park all converge here.

Pretoria

South Africa's administrative capital turns lilac every spring when thousands of jacaranda trees burst into flower along its avenues, creating one of the most striking urban spectacles in Africa. The Union Buildings, Voortrekker Monument, and Freedom Park heritage precinct give Pretoria an outsized historical and political weight that rewards a slower visit.

Franschhoek

Settled by French Huguenot refugees in the late 17th century — the name means 'French Corner' — Franschhoek has evolved into South Africa's undisputed gourmet capital, with a single main street lined with world-class restaurants, boutique wine estates, and a heritage museum. Arriving by the famous Wine Tram, hopping between estates in a hop-on hop-off gondola, is the ultimate Winelands afternoon.

Hermanus

From June to November, southern right whales breach so close to Hermanus's cliff-top path that the town employs a dedicated whale crier who blows a kelp horn to announce sightings — making this the world's finest destination for land-based whale watching. Outside whale season, the Walker Bay wine ward and spectacular cliff walks remain compelling reasons to visit.

Plettenberg Bay

South Africa's most fashionable beach town draws the Cape Town elite to its wide white-sand bays each summer, while the Robberg Peninsula Nature Reserve — a 45-minute circuit around a sea-girt headland — offers Cape fur seals, dolphins, and sheer cliff views that rival anything on the continent. The Tsitsikamma Forest begins just to the east, making Plett the ideal base for the eastern Garden Route.

Jeffrey's Bay

Surfers have been making the pilgrimage to J-Bay since the 1960s for the Supertubes break — one of the longest, fastest right-hand point breaks on earth, hosting the WSL Championship Tour annually. Even non-surfers come for the shell-studded beaches, fresh seafood, and the unhurried small-town pace that feels a world away from South Africa's cities.

Oudtshoorn

The ostrich capital of the world sits in the semi-arid Klein Karoo, where Victorian-era 'feather palaces' built by wealthy ostrich barons during the early 20th-century feather boom still stand along its main street. The Cango Caves — an underground limestone labyrinth stretching over 5 km — are among South Africa's most visited natural attractions, drawing visitors who squeeze through the Adventure Route's tightest passages.

Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha)

Renamed Gqeberha in 2021 to reclaim its Xhosa heritage, this breezy Eastern Cape city is the gateway to Addo Elephant National Park — where over 600 elephants, lions, and the world's densest concentration of black rhino roam a malaria-free reserve. The surrounding coastline offers world-class great white shark cage diving at Aliwal Shoal and the perfect beaches of Sardinia Bay.

Sun City

Rising from the North West bushveld near an ancient volcanic crater, Sun City is Southern Africa's most ambitious resort complex — a self-contained world of hotels, casinos, a wave pool, and a beach in the middle of landlocked savanna. The adjacent Pilanesberg National Park, inside the volcanic ring structure, offers outstanding Big Five safaris just 90 minutes from Johannesburg.

Kimberley

The diamond rush that put South Africa on the world map began at Kimberley's Big Hole — the world's largest hand-dug excavation, now a flooded crater of 215 m depth beside a preserved Victorian mining village. The Kimberley Mine Museum is one of the country's most authentic heritage experiences, and the city remains the gateway to the vast, sparsely populated Northern Cape.

Hluhluwe

The small town of Hluhluwe sits at the edge of Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park — Africa's oldest proclaimed game reserve and the site of the white rhino's dramatic recovery from near-extinction in the 20th century. Nearby iSimangaliso Wetland Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the few places on earth where you can go snorkelling over coral reef in the morning and on a big-five safari in the afternoon.

Graskop

Perched on the edge of the Mpumalanga escarpment, Graskop is the launch point for the Panorama Route — a succession of breathtaking viewpoints including God's Window, the Lisbon and Berlin Falls, and the swirling geological curiosities of Bourke's Luck Potholes. The town is also unexpectedly famous for its pancake restaurants, an unlikely local institution since the 1980s.

Pietermaritzburg

The legislative capital of KwaZulu-Natal was founded by Voortrekker settlers in 1838, and its Victorian red-brick city hall — reputedly the largest in the Southern Hemisphere — still dominates the centre. The surrounding Midlands Meander, a craft, cheese, and trout-fishing route through rolling green hills, is one of South Africa's most pleasant half-day drives.

George

George is the Garden Route's practical hub — a comfortable base for the forests, beaches, and lagoons stretching from Wilderness to Mossel Bay. The Outeniqua Mountains behind the town offer excellent mountain biking and hiking, while the restored Outeniqua Choo-Tjoe steam train, which once climbed through indigenous forest to Knysna, remains a nostalgic icon of South African travel history.

Upington

Straddling the Orange River in the heart of the Northern Cape, Upington is the springboard for the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park — one of the world's great wilderness areas, where black-maned Kalahari lions and cheetahs hunt across red sand dunes. The unexpected sight of wine-producing vineyards irrigated from the Orange River in the middle of the desert adds to Upington's quiet improbability.

Mossel Bay

The spot where Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias first set foot in southern Africa in 1488 now draws visitors for its remarkable combination of maritime history and adrenaline — the Dias Museum Complex preserves a replica caravel, while cage diving with great white sharks offshore has become one of South Africa's most dramatic wildlife experiences.

The windswept island in Table Bay where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years imprisoned is the most emotionally charged heritage site in South Africa — guided by former political prisoners through the cell blocks and limestone quarry where inmates secretly educated each other. Just 11 km from Cape Town's V&A Waterfront, the short ferry crossing mirrors the deliberate isolation that made Robben Island apartheid's most potent symbol of oppression and resistance.

The dolomite caves of the Cradle of Humankind northwest of Johannesburg have yielded more early hominin fossils than any other site on earth — including the 'Mrs. Ples' skull and the near-complete skeleton of 'Little Foot', dated to over 3.5 million years ago. The Maropeng visitor centre translates the science into an immersive journey through deep time, making this UNESCO site as accessible as it is scientifically profound.

Straddling South Africa and Lesotho, the soaring basalt ramparts of the Drakensberg shelter both the highest peaks in southern Africa and the world's greatest concentration of San Bushman rock art — more than 35,000 individual paintings in over 600 sites. The Amphitheatre's sheer 5 km wall and the Tugela Falls, which plunges 947 m in five stages, define a landscape of theatre and scale unlike anything else in the region.

Along the KwaZulu-Natal coast north of Durban, iSimangaliso — 'miracle and wonder' in Zulu — protects Africa's largest estuarine system, where hippos and crocodiles share warm lagoons with flamingos, while humpback whales breach offshore and loggerhead turtles nest on beaches that have changed little in 30,000 years. Five distinct ecosystems in close proximity, from coral reef to savanna, make it one of the most biodiverse stretches of coastline on the continent.

The fynbos biome of the Western Cape is one of only six floral kingdoms on earth and the richest per unit area of any — supporting over 9,000 plant species, nearly 70% found nowhere else, in a Mediterranean climate shaped by fire. The protected areas encompassing Table Mountain National Park, the Cederberg Wilderness, and the Boland mountain chain form a discontinuous arc of exceptional biodiversity that includes South Africa's national flower, the king protea.

Two billion years ago, a meteorite at least 10 km across struck what is now the Free State with an impact that reshaped the surrounding geology so catastrophically that it brought gold-bearing reef close enough to the surface to be mined — making Vredefort Dome indirectly responsible for Johannesburg's existence. The resulting concentric ring structure, now visible in the landscape around the town of Parys, is the world's oldest and largest confirmed meteorite impact crater.

At the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe rivers where South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana meet, Mapungubwe was southern Africa's most sophisticated pre-colonial kingdom between AD 900 and 1300 — trading gold and ivory with Arabia, India, and China. The golden rhinoceros figurine unearthed from its hilltop royal burial site, now in the University of Pretoria's museum, stands as the emblem of an African civilisation that history largely forgot.

The greenstone belt of the Makhonjwa Mountains in Mpumalanga contains some of the oldest and best-preserved pieces of Earth's early crust, with rocks dated to 3.6 billion years that carry evidence of the planet's primordial oceans and first microbial life. For geologists this is the equivalent of a living archive of the early Earth; for visitors it sits conveniently close to Kruger National Park, combining two of South Africa's most compelling natural assets.

In the harsh, mountainous desert of South Africa's far northwest, the semi-nomadic Nama people continue a transhumant pastoral lifestyle centred on portable reed mat houses called haru oms, one of the last such practices surviving in southern Africa. The landscape itself is a botanical marvel — the richest succulent desert flora on earth, home to the extraordinary halfmens tree that tilts northward as if drawn toward a warmer climate.

In the red sand dunes of the Kalahari along the Botswana border, the ǂKhomani San people carry a knowledge system — of plants, animals, tracking, and healing — that reaches back tens of thousands of years, making this cultural landscape a living archive of the world's oldest traceable hunter-gatherer culture. The inscription helped restore land rights to the community, and the adjacent Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, where black-maned lions and cheetahs hunt across orange dunes, makes the region an extraordinary combined destination.

Inscribed in 2024, this serial nomination links eight locations across South Africa that trace the arc of Nelson Mandela's life and the anti-apartheid struggle — from his birthplace in Mvezo in the Eastern Cape, to his Soweto home on Vilakazi Street, to the Liliesleaf Farm where ANC leaders were arrested in 1963. Together they map one of the 20th century's defining journeys from imprisonment to reconciliation, connecting sites spread across four provinces.

Also inscribed in 2024, this serial site gathers coastal and inland caves of the Western and Eastern Cape — including Blombos Cave, Pinnacle Point, and Sibudu — where archaeologists have found the earliest evidence of abstract thinking, ochre engraving, and shell bead jewellery, pushing the origins of behavioural modernity back at least 100,000 years. These sites have fundamentally rewritten the scientific story of when and where the fully modern human mind first emerged.