Company's Garden

Look around you: this park is where Cape Town began. The city was not born as a colony or a military harbour but as a vegetable garden. The Dutch East India Company needed fresh vegetables and fruit so that its crews would not die of scurvy on the long voyage to Asia.

1A garden for the spice route

A few weeks after the landing of 1652, the gardener Hendrik Boom began preparing the soil. The settlers noted down every day what they sowed and what came up, and gradually built a planting calendar suited to this climate. By around 1658, according to the records, almost every garden plant from Europe and India was growing here. In the late 17th century Governor Simon van der Stel turned it into a pleasure garden that amazed travellers. Much of the work was done by enslaved people who lived in the Slave Lodge at the end of the avenue.

Among the trees is a saffron pear said to be more than 300 years old: tradition has it that it was planted in Van Riebeeck's day.

2The mountain and the devil

Look up at Table Mountain. To its left you will see a sharp peak: Devil's Peak. According to a Cape legend, a retired pirate called Jan van Hunks once held a pipe-smoking contest up there against a stranger who turned out to be the devil, and the smoke from the pair of them formed the cloud that sometimes covers the mountain like a tablecloth.

3What to look for

• The statue of Cecil Rhodes, from the early 20th century, with the inscription ‘Your hinterland is there’.
• The grey squirrels, brought from North America around 1900 at the instigation of Rhodes himself.
• The ‘tablecloth’ of cloud, if it is draped over the summit today.