Explore Cape Town in Google Street View

Cape Town is built in the gap between Table Mountain and the sea, and the mountain governs everything. It is flat on top because it is sandstone laid down horizontally and eroded evenly, and it drops in near-vertical cliffs on the city side. The result is that the centre has nowhere to expand, the suburbs run round the base in a long arc, and almost every street in the bowl has the mountain closing the view at one end.

Chapman's Peak Drive is the single best road in the imagery. It was cut into a cliff face between Hout Bay and Noordhoek, following the boundary between granite below and sandstone above, and it runs for nine kilometres with the ocean straight down on one side. The road was closed for years after rockfalls and reopened with concrete half-tunnels, which are visible as you go and are the reason the route exists at all.

The Bo-Kaap is the most photographed neighbourhood and the colour is recent. The houses are eighteenth and nineteenth century, originally rented and required to be white, and were painted in bright colours by residents after the properties could be bought. The steep cobbled streets run straight up towards Signal Hill, so from the bottom of Wale Street you get colour in the foreground and mountain behind it.

For the coast, follow the road round the peninsula. Camps Bay and Clifton on the Atlantic side face west into cold water and enormous sunsets; twenty minutes away on the False Bay side, Muizenberg and Kalk Bay face east into warmer water and a completely different mood. Doing both virtually in sequence makes the geography obvious in a way a map does not.

The townships are part of the city and the imagery includes them. Langa, Gugulethu and Khayelitsha are on the Cape Flats, the sandy plain east of the mountain where people were forcibly relocated under apartheid-era legislation. Following the N2 out from the centre and seeing the change in density and building material is the most direct way the imagery tells you something true about how this city was made.

One practical note for exploring. The Cape Peninsula is a national park at its southern end, and the roads through it to Cape Point are covered. That gives you around sixty kilometres of coastal driving from the city to the tip, with the two ocean sides visible at different points, and it is the best long route in the imagery anywhere in Africa.