24 hours in Cape Town: what to see

Table Mountain is the first engagement of the day: the rotating cable car climbs to the 1,085-meter peak in minutes, from which you see the entire city, the Cape Peninsula and Robben Island offshore, weather permitting, as clouds can cover it quickly.

Descending reaches the V&A Waterfront, the historic port converted into an area of restaurants, shops and piers from which ferries depart for Robben Island, the prison-island where Nelson Mandela was held for eighteen of his twenty-seven years of imprisonment.

For lunch, Waterfront restaurants offer fresh fish and Cape Malay cuisine, with Indonesian and Malay influences brought by Dutch colonists centuries ago.

The coast leads to Boulders Beach, the beach where an African penguin colony lives observed closely thanks to wooden walkways.

In the city, Bo-Kaap is the quarter with colonial houses painted in bright colors, historically inhabited by the Cape Malay Muslim community, with its mosques among South Africa's oldest.

At sunset, Camps Bay — the beach with its bars and restaurants directly facing the ocean, the Twelve Apostles peaks behind — is where to stop for dinner.

Table Mountain, the V&A Waterfront, and Robben Island help understand Cape Town's relationship with the sea and its recent history, while the afternoon choice between Boulders Beach and Bo-Kaap adds the naturalistic or cultural side.

The Cape of Good Hope, at the peninsula's tip, and the wineries of Stellenbosch, an hour's drive, remain chapters for a second trip. Watching the sun set behind the Twelve Apostles, seen from Camps Bay, remains Cape Town's most memorable detail.