This month's museum pick...

Cape Town Museums

23 Varied Museums Give You an Excuse to Enjoy Cape Town’s Fabled Geography

From the first sighting at sea of its marvelous table-shaped mountain by a European sailor in 1486, and its subsequent establishment as a way station in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company, Cape Town has been South Africa’s liveliest, most beautiful, most colorful city. Even during the dark years of apartheid, which clamped down in its most brutal form in 1948 and lasted through the late 1980s, Cape Town was the one place in South Africa where authorities often looked the other way when people of different races socialized or even lived together.

Probably its seaside location and great distance from the dour Boers of Pretoria  and Johannesburg are what gave Cape Town its jauntier air. From early on the city was a port that drew sailors from Europe, Africa and Asia, producing a multi-ethnic, polyglot settlement much like San Francisco. It was harder for racism to root as deeply or energetically here at an international crossroads than in the isolated, parochial settlements of the interior.

Still, it was at Robben Island, just a few miles off Cape Town’s gleaming beaches, that the South African government imprisoned Nelson Mandela, the patient and charismatic black dissenter who would eventually become the country's first post-apartheid president.

As with San Francisco, Cape Town’s  magnificent setting has never hurt it. It sits at 34 degrees latitude, the same as Los Angeles, Santiago and Perth, providing it a magnificent, sea-tempered Mediterranean climate, with warm, dry summers and cool, moist winters. Table Mountain, the magnificent mesa that rises 3,000 behind the city, not only gives the city its world-renowned silhouette, but stands as sort of a gateway to a hinterland of mountains, valleys, farms, wineries and villages that carry on the Mediterranean feel.

This is a blessed place, and its 1 million inhabitants (2.1 million more in the metro area) know it. Considering Cape Town’s status as a third-world city with a first-world infrastructure, they are also blessed with a high number of museums, historical and cultural sites, and scientific preserves: 23. Among them are the South African Cultural History Museum, the South African National Gallery, the Design Museum, the South African Jewish Museum, the South African Air Force Museum, the West Coast Fossil Park, the Cape Town Holocaust center, the Robben Island Museum and the Planetarium. There are several art collections, ranging from 17^th century Flemish masters to contemporary African that are housed in their donors’ original homesteads.

As with Rio, geography in the form of steep encroaching hills has conspired to make Cape Town fairly dense and compact. That puts many of the museums within easy walking distance of one another.

The museums provide a theme or an excuse to visit this delightful city. Now at the height of its Southern Hemisphere summer, Cape Town will soon begin sliding into its delightful and lingering autumn – a perfect time for travel. — Patrick Totty