Explore
Discover South Africa
Choose a theme, or browse every place below. Each one opens with a full story and every one is source-verified.
Wildlife & Safari
Track the Big Five across Kruger, Sabi Sand and Addo.
Landmarks & Cities
Table Mountain, Robben Island and the Mother City.
Nature & Landscapes
The Garden Route, Blyde Canyon and the Drakensberg.
Beaches & Coast
Two oceans, penguins at Boulders and the Wild Coast.
Wine & Food
Stellenbosch estates, the wine tram and braai culture.
Culture & History
The Cradle of Humankind, Soweto and the Mandela legacy.
Adventure & Activities
Bloukrans bungy, shark cage diving and the Sani Pass.
All places
- Wildlife & SafariEastern Cape
Addo Elephant National Park
Malaria-free Big Seven country in the Eastern Cape.
Verified · 1 source 
Adventure & ActivitiesKwaZulu-NatalAliwal Shoal
A fossilised dune reef about 5 km off Umkomaas where cage-free divers meet ragged-tooth sharks in winter and open-water tiger sharks in summer.
Verified · 5 sources
Culture & HistoryGautengApartheid Museum
At the door you are handed a ticket marked "white" or "non-white" and directed to separate entrances, so apartheid's logic confronts you before a single exhibit does.
Verified · 4 sources
Nature & LandscapesNorthern CapeAugrabies Falls National Park
The Orange River gathers across the Northern Cape desert, then hurls itself 56 metres off a granite lip into a gorge the Khoi named for its thunder: the "place of great noise."
Verified · 4 sources
Wine & FoodWestern CapeBabylonstoren
A 1692 Cape Dutch farm between Paarl and Franschhoek whose owners planted a three-and-a-half-hectare garden in which every single plant is edible or medicinal.
Verified · 6 sources
Beaches & CoastKwaZulu-NatalBallito Willard Beach
Warm Indian Ocean swimming, a current Blue Flag beach, and the WSL Ballito Pro packing family fun and world-tour surfing onto one stretch of Dolphin Coast sand.
Verified · 3 sources
Adventure & ActivitiesWestern CapeBloubergstrand Kite Beach
Kitesurf beneath a postcard view of Table Mountain rising across Table Bay Cape Town's kitesurfing mecca and home to Red Bull's King of the Air big-air showdown.
Verified · 3 sources
Adventure & ActivitiesWestern CapeBloukrans Bridge Bungy
Leap from what is widely recognised as the world's highest commercial bridge bungy 216 metres.
Verified · 2 sources- Nature & LandscapesMpumalanga
Blyde River Canyon
A vast, green-walled canyon and the highlight of the Panorama Route.
Verified · 1 source 
Culture & HistoryWestern CapeBo-Kaap
Beneath Signal Hill, a hillside of candy-bright houses and cobbled lanes holds Cape Town's oldest surviving residential quarter and the heart of Cape Malay culture.
Verified · 5 sources
Wine & FoodWestern CapeBoschendal
Title deeds dated 1685, a gable that still carries the initials of the couple who raised it in 1812, and a national heritage site at the heart of a roughly 1,800-hectare working farm.
Verified · 6 sources- Beaches & CoastWestern Cape
Boulders Beach
Share a sheltered white-sand cove with a colony of African penguins.
Verified · 2 sources 
Nature & LandscapesMpumalangaBourke's Luck Potholes
Swirling rivers have drilled deep cylindrical potholes into the rock here, at the joy-and-sorrow confluence that opens the Blyde River Canyon.
Verified · 2 sources
Nature & LandscapesWestern CapeCango Caves
A vast limestone cave system in the Swartberg foothills.
Verified · 1 source
Nature & LandscapesWestern CapeCape Agulhas
The geographic southern tip of Africa, where the Atlantic and Indian oceans officially meet beneath one of the country's oldest working lighthouses.
Verified · 6 sources- Landmarks & CitiesWestern Cape
Cape Point & the Cape of Good Hope
The wind-scoured tip of the Cape Peninsula, where a wooden sign marks Africa's most south-western point and two lighthouses tell the story of a coast that ate ships.
Verified · 15 sources 
Adventure & ActivitiesEastern CapeCape St Francis
Home to a right-hand point once crowned the 'perfect wave' in the 1966 film The Endless Summer, and to Seal Point Lighthouse reputedly South Africa's tallest masonry lighthouse.
Verified · 3 sources
Nature & LandscapesWestern CapeChapman's Peak Drive
A cliff-hugging toll road of 114 curves between Hout Bay and Noordhoek, with some of the Cape Peninsula's most dramatic Atlantic views.
Verified · 2 sources
Beaches & CoastWestern CapeClifton Beaches
Four white-sand coves stacked below Lion's Head, divided by giant granite boulders and cupped in a wind shadow that shuts out Cape Town's south-easter beside Atlantic water cold enough to make you gasp.
Verified · 4 sources
Culture & HistoryGautengConstitution Hill
A century-old prison where Gandhi and Mandela were once held now cradles South Africa's Constitutional Court: repression remade, brick by brick, into a monument to human rights.
Verified · 4 sources
Culture & HistoryGautengCradle of Humankind
The caves where some of our earliest ancestors were unearthed.
Verified · 2 sources- Beaches & CoastKwaZulu-Natal
Durban Golden Mile
Durban's warm-water beachfront and buzzing promenade.
Verified · 1 source 
Adventure & ActivitiesWestern CapeElands Bay
A cold, cooking left-hand point break peeling for a hundred-plus metres on the wild West Coast with ancient San rock art in a cave on the headland right above the lineup.
Verified · 3 sources
Wine & FoodWestern CapeFairview
A Paarl farm called Cauliflower Fountain in 1693, now better known for a two-storey tower its goats climb and a Rhône-baiting wine that made the French reach for their lawyers.
Verified · 6 sources
Wine & FoodWestern CapeFranschhoek
A French Huguenot refuge cupped in a mountain-ringed valley, where Cape Dutch wine estates and a hop-on tram trade on more than three centuries of the vine.
Verified · 4 sources
Adventure & ActivitiesWestern CapeGansbaai Shark Cage Diving
Come face to face with sharks in the self-styled great white capital.
Verified · 1 source
Nature & LandscapesMpumalangaGod's Window
A dizzying Panorama Route viewpoint where the Drakensberg escarpment falls roughly 700 m to the Lowveld and Kruger stretches toward the horizon.
Verified · 2 sources
Nature & LandscapesFree StateGolden Gate Highlands National Park
As the sun drops, the Brandwag Buttress and its facing sandstone cliffs blaze gold above the eastern Free State highlands the glowing gateway that gave this park its name.
Verified · 4 sources
Adventure & ActivitiesMpumalangaGraskop Gorge Lift
Ride a glass elevator 51 m down a forested cliff on the Panorama Route or freefall 70 m at up to 140 km/h on the Big Swing.
Verified · 2 sources
Nature & LandscapesWestern CapeGreat African Seaforest
Snorkel through towering golden kelp off Simon's Town in False Bay the underwater wild made famous by the Oscar-winning 'My Octopus Teacher'.
Verified · 2 sources
Wine & FoodWestern CapeGroot Constantia
South Africa's oldest wine estate, pressing grapes without pause since 1685 and the source of a sweet Constantia wine once said to have eased Napoleon's exile.
Verified · 3 sources- Wildlife & SafariWestern Cape
Hermanus
One of the world's best spots to watch whales from dry land.
Verified · 1 source 
Wildlife & SafariKwaZulu-NatalHluhluwe-iMfolozi Park
Widely documented as Africa's oldest proclaimed game reserve, where Operation Rhino brought the southern white rhino back from the brink and all of the Big Five still roam the hills of Zululand.
Verified · 4 sources
Beaches & CoastEastern CapeHole in the Wall
A wave-bored archway pierces a dolerite-capped island of shale at the mouth of the Mpako River the Xhosa call it esiKhaleni, the place of sound.
Verified · 4 sources
Nature & LandscapesKwaZulu-NataliSimangaliso Wetland Park
Where what is widely described as Africa's largest estuarine system meets the Indian Ocean, the Big Five roam beside 800 hippos, 1,200 crocodiles and beaches where sea turtles still come ashore to nest.
Verified · 4 sources
Adventure & ActivitiesEastern CapeJeffreys Bay
Home to Supertubes, a long, fast right-hand point break that draws the world's top surfers to the Eastern Cape coast each July.
Verified · 2 sources
Adventure & ActivitiesWestern CapeK3 Zipline
A single 3.2-kilometre cable off the Klein Swartberg above Caledon, which its operator calls the world's longest zipline and which is, without argument, Africa's.
Verified · 9 sources- Nature & LandscapesWestern Cape
Kirstenbosch
A world-renowned botanical garden on the slopes of Table Mountain.
Verified · 1 source 
Beaches & CoastWestern CapeKnysna
A Garden Route town wrapped around a tidal lagoon, where the sea funnels between the towering quartzite cliffs of the Knysna Heads into one of South Africa's most important estuaries.
Verified · 6 sources- Wildlife & SafariMpumalanga
Kruger National Park
South Africa's flagship safari Big Five country roughly the size of a small nation.
Verified · 33 sources 
Adventure & ActivitiesWestern CapeLangebaan Lagoon
A vast turquoise lagoon of warm, waist-deep, mirror-flat water inside a national park a kite- and windsurfer's dream barely 90 minutes north of Cape Town.
Verified · 3 sources
Wildlife & SafariNorth WestMadikwe Game Reserve
A malaria-free Big Five wilderness on the Botswana border, reborn from marginal cattle farms and now one of South Africa's best places to watch endangered African wild dogs on the move.
Verified · 3 sources
Adventure & ActivitiesLimpopoMagoebaskloof Canopy Tour
Glide between treetop platforms on zip-lines up to 150 m long, soaring over three waterfalls in Limpopo's misty Groot Letaba gorge.
Verified · 2 sources
Culture & HistoryLimpopoMapungubwe National Park
Where the Limpopo and Shashe rivers meet, a sandstone hill holds the graves of kings buried in gold the heart of what UNESCO describes as southern Africa's first kingdom.
Verified · 4 sources
Landmarks & CitiesGautengMontecasino
A full-scale mock Tuscan village under a painted sky in northern Johannesburg casino floor, bird gardens and what South African Tourism calls the country's largest theatre, all indoors.
Verified · 6 sources
Adventure & ActivitiesWestern CapeMossel Bay Zipline
A 1.1-kilometre cable strung down the cliffs at The Point past a Victorian lighthouse and a Stone Age cave that its operator bills as the world's longest zipline over the ocean.
Verified · 9 sources
Adventure & ActivitiesWestern CapeMuizenberg Beach
Cape Town's friendliest surf beach, backed by a rainbow row of Victorian bathing boxes on the warmer False Bay shore.
Verified · 2 sources
Nature & LandscapesNorthern CapeNamaqualand
A parched Northern Cape wilderness that, for a few spring weeks, erupts into one of the world's great wildflower displays.
Verified · 4 sources
Wine & FoodWestern CapePaarl
Beneath three granite domes that glisten like pearls after rain, Paarl pours storied Cape wines in the shadow of a monument built to a language.
Verified · 4 sources
Wildlife & SafariNorth WestPilanesberg National Park
A malaria-free Big Five wilderness set in the eroded crater of a volcano that last erupted well over a billion years ago, its concentric stone rings still legible from the air.
Verified · 4 sources
Beaches & CoastWestern CapePlettenberg Bay
Southern right whales calve within sight of golden Garden Route sand at Plettenberg Bay one of only a handful of coastlines worldwide accredited as a Whale Heritage Site.
Verified · 4 sources
Adventure & ActivitiesKwaZulu-NatalProtea Banks
A deep fossilised-dune reef 7.5 km off Shelly Beach where advanced divers drift with hammerheads and ragged-tooth, tiger and bull sharks.
Verified · 2 sources- Culture & HistoryWestern Cape
Robben Island
The island prison where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years now a World Heritage Site.
Verified · 2 sources 
Wildlife & SafariMpumalangaSabi Sand Game Reserve
On Kruger's unfenced western edge, this pioneering private reserve is said to deliver Africa's most reliable leopard sightings, with the Big Five roaming freely across some 65,000 hectares of Lowveld wilderness.
Verified · 4 sources
Adventure & ActivitiesKwaZulu-NatalSani Pass
A legendary 4x4 climb to the roof of southern Africa.
Verified · 1 source
Beaches & CoastKwaZulu-NatalSodwana Bay
A diving mecca on KwaZulu-Natal's remote Maputaland coast, where some of the world's most southerly coral reefs shelter more than 1,200 fish species inside a UNESCO World Heritage wetland.
Verified · 4 sources- Culture & HistoryGauteng
Soweto
The township at the heart of South Africa's freedom struggle.
Verified · 1 source 
Wine & FoodWestern CapeSpier
A 1692 Stellenbosch farm that keeps its wine in what it describes as the country's oldest dated cellar and hangs a thousand contemporary South African artworks across its barns, lawns and hotel corridors.
Verified · 6 sources- Wine & FoodWestern Cape
Stellenbosch
Oak-lined streets, Cape Dutch gables and one of South Africa's oldest wine routes.
Verified · 1 source - Landmarks & CitiesWestern Cape
Table Mountain
Cape Town's flat-topped icon reachable by cableway or a hike up Platteklip Gorge.
Verified · 2 sources - Nature & LandscapesKwaZulu-Natal
The Drakensberg
South Africa's highest mountains, rich in San rock art and hiking trails.
Verified · 2 sources 
Adventure & ActivitiesEastern CapeTsitsikamma
Where the Storms River spills into the Indian Ocean, a swaying 77-metre suspension bridge strung since 1969 marks the wild heart of Tsitsikamma the Garden Route's malaria-free adventure capital.
Verified · 4 sources
Landmarks & CitiesGautengUnion Buildings
Herbert Baker's sandstone crescent crowns a Pretoria hilltop the seat of South African government where Mandela was sworn in, its gardens now a UNESCO-listed emblem of reconciliation.
Verified · 4 sources- Landmarks & CitiesWestern Cape
V&A Waterfront
Cape Town's buzzing harbour district and the ferry gateway to Robben Island.
Verified · 1 source 
Adventure & ActivitiesNorth WestValley of the Waves
Sun City's beach-fronted wave pool rolls in a fresh breaker every 90 seconds beside slides like the near-vertical, 70 m Temple of Courage.
Verified · 2 sources
Wine & FoodWestern CapeVergelegen
Granted to a governor on 1 February 1700 and taken away from him seven years later and the five camphor trees he planted at the gate were declared national monuments in 1942.
Verified · 6 sources
