Activities in & around Cape Town

Cape Town, the “Mother City” on the tip of Africa, a cosmopilitan city with a complex history and spectacular beauty will be home to you for a semester. A city of contrasts from  wealth to poverty and a melting pot of cultures, it offers endless possibilities to explore and experience mountains, beaches, wine farms, inner city creative developments, the Bo-Kaap and District Six (the area of forced removals under apartheid) to the lively Victoria and Albert area in the working harbour and small creative restaurants and shops of the currently cool Bree and Loop Streets.

For the seventh consecutive year Cape Town was named as the best city in the world to visit  by the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, the Western Cape and Cape Town are  also considered the top outdoor adventure sport areas of South Africa.

Music, theatre, design, food, sunset hikes, surfing, swimming with penguins, museums and galleries, home-stays in informal settlements  and voluntary work  are all within thirty minutes of the city centre.

Day trips a few hours from the city centre are an easy drive and include towns such as  Stellenbosch and Franschoek for their wineries, Hermanus, world renowned for its whale festival, the Cedarberg Mountains for the rock art paintings and wilderness and Gansbaai for its shark cage diving.

Students frequently do trips during the short breaks, long weekends, before they arrive and after exams. From short trips up the beautiful  Garden Route that runs parallel to the Indian Ocean to longer trips further afield to the Eastern Cape, Kruger Park, Durban and some of the neighbouring countries of Mozambique and Botswana.