The city of Cape Town had its origin in 1652, when the Dutch East India Companyestablished a refreshment station for its ships on the shores of Table Bay. The location was magnificent, on well-watered, fertile soil, beneath the precipitous walls of Table Mountain. The indigenous inhabitants provided cattle but not labour, and the company imported slaves, mainly from East Africa, Madagascar, and the Bay of Bengal area. The slaves brought with them something of their culture and—especially in the case of the Muslims from the East Indies—their religion. Mixed-race unions took place, but strong racial and ethnic characteristics remained. In 1781 the French established a garrison to help the Dutch defend the city against British attack, and the French presence influenced local architecture and culture. British occupation in the 19th century brought new parliamentary and judicial concepts and freedom for the slaves. Cape Town was the gateway to Europe’s penetration of the South African interior, and close ties with continental Europe were maintained.

Today Cape Town is a modern city with high-rise office buildings and pedestrian malls. Although it is a major political and economic centre, its reputation still rests on its beautiful situation between mountain and sea, its cosmopolitan population, and the liberal outlook of many of its citizens.

The first settlement of Cape Town was situated between Table Mountain and Table Bay. It was bounded on the northwest by the ridges known as Lion’s Head and Lion’s Rump (later called Signal Hill), on the north by Table Bay, on the south by Devil’s Peak, and on the east by marshlands and the sandy Cape Flats beyond. The nearest tillable land was on the lower eastern slopes of Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain and, farther to the southeast, at Rondebosch, Newlands, and Wynberg. From the fortress that protected the settlement, a track led south past these lands to False Bay on the eastern side of the Cape Peninsula and on beyond Muizenberg and Kalk Bay to Simon’s Bay, where the East Indiaman trade ships could find shelter from northwesterly winter gales. The constraints of mountain, sea, and sand shaped the direction of Cape Town’s growth, and the pattern was followed in subsequent road and rail construction. A railway line reached Wynberg in 1864 and Muizenberg in 1883, and another line ran eastward from Cape Town across the Flats to the interior.

The climate of Cape Town is Mediterranean in type; it is locally modified by the mass of Table Mountain and by the cold Benguela Current of the South Atlantic Ocean. The average high temperature is 70° F (21° C), in January and February, and the average low is 55° F (13° C), in July, but temperatures are cooler on the mountain slopes and on the coast. Freezing occurs infrequently. On the average, rain falls on 69 days of the year; about half of the 26 inches (660 millimetres) of annual rainfall occurs between June and August, the southern winter. The amount of rainfall varies with proximity to the mountain, with areas close to the slopes receiving as much as twice the precipitation of areas farther away. The winds, generally strong, come from the northwest in winter and vary from between southeast and southwest in summer. Southerly winds produce a cloud cover over Table Mountain known as the “tablecloth.” These winds are collectively referred to as the “Cape doctor” because they keep air pollution at a low level.

More than half of the residents of the city and metropolitan area are Coloured (the former official term for people of mixed race), about one-fourth are white, about one-fifth are Black, and the remainder are of Asian—primarily Indian—origin. In the metropolitan area Afrikaans is the first language of almost half the Coloureds and whites. Almost one-quarter speak English as a first language, and another quarter are equally at home in both languages. The Blacks are predominantly Xhosa-speaking. The majority of the residents are members of Protestant churches, but there are also sizable communities of Roman Catholics and Muslims.

South Africa’s Group Areas Act of 1966 consolidated earlier acts aimed at enforcing the policy of racial segregation known as apartheid, and it provided for the reservation of certain areas for residence and occupation by specific racial groups within the population. The act brought about many changes in Cape Town’s residential areas; for example, a mixed but predominantly Coloured neighbourhood known as District Six, south of the Castle, was cleared by bulldozers. Special legislation permitted Coloureds who were living in Cape Town’s Malay Quarter to remain, but other Coloured and Indian families were forced to move to designated areas, mostly east of the Cape Town–Muizenberg railway line and onto the Cape Flats. According to figures submitted to Parliament, by the end of 1980 some 29,300 Coloured and 1,500 Indian families, but only 195 white families, had been resettled on the Cape Peninsula. Because housing in the prescribed areas was inadequate, in 1975 the city undertook construction with government funding of a model township of 40,000 houses for Coloured families at Mitchells Plain, southeast of the city. Indian families were installed at Rylands and Pelikan Park. In 1990 the government did an about-face over District Six, opening it to residence by all sections of the Cape Town community.

Nearly all Blacks in Cape Town were confined to Guguletu and Nyanga West within the city limits and to neighbouring Nyanga and Langa. With the abolition of influx controls in the 1980s, a great movement of Blacks into Cape Town and other urban areas from impoverished Black states began, and camps of squatters were soon overcrowded. The government established a township for Blacks at Khayelitsha, east of Mitchells Plain, and squatter camps were then demolished in 1986 in an attempt to direct the Blacks there.