Castle of Good Hope

In front of you stands the oldest building in South Africa. It is hard to picture now, but when it was built the sea came almost up to its walls: all the ground between here and the bay today was reclaimed from the water in the 20th century.

1A stopover on the spice route

In April 1652 Jan van Riebeeck landed here on the orders of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC. He had not come to conquer a country but to set up a refreshment station for ships sailing to and from Asia. First he built a fort of clay and timber. In 1664, fearing war with England, the Company ordered it replaced with a pentagonal stone fortress. The first stone was laid on 2 January 1666 and the work, halted again and again for lack of money, was declared finished in 1679.

Those walls were not raised by soldiers alone. Enslaved people brought from Madagascar, India and the Indonesian archipelago worked on the site alongside soldiers and convicts. The settlers' arrival also meant dispossession for the Khoikhoi, who had grazed their cattle on this land for centuries.

The Castle was seat of government, barracks, prison and warehouse: for a century and a half, almost everything at the Cape was decided here.

The five bastions bear the titles of William III of Orange: Leerdam, Buuren, Katzenellenbogen, Nassau and Oranje. In 1936 it became the first place in South Africa to be declared a historical monument.

2What to look for

• The 1682 gateway, which replaced the old entrance facing the sea.
• The bell tower above the arch: its bell, cast in Amsterdam in 1697, is the oldest in the country.
• The moat and the angled bastions, designed so that no stretch of wall was left uncovered.