The Victoria & Alfred Waterfront

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20th March - The Victoria & Alfred Waterfront: Cape Town's Original Harbour #heygo http://www.heygo.com



Our virtual tour today started in The Silo District outside The Zeitz MOCAA (Museum of Contemporary Art Africa) which was built in the remnants of the old grain silo which was once the tallest building in Africa. It was built in 1921 and served as harbour-side storage for grain.

Our guide popped quickly into the lobby area and Wow with soaring columns, high ceilings, and cut out concrete, it was like walking into an industrial cathedral.



In the surrounding area visitors can 7 Wonders picture frame to get a shot of Table Mountain and the mother city. We were lucky that the picture frame was not busy with the usual tourists. Today as the guide said ‘We can see the white tablecloth’



The first Europeans to discover the Cape were the Portuguese in 1488 The next recorded European sighting of the Cape was Vasco da Gama in 1497 while he was searching for a route that would lead directly from Europe to Asia.

The area fell out of regular contact with Europeans until 1652, when employees of the Dutch India Company were sent to the Cape to establish a halfway station to provide fresh water, vegetables, and meat for passing ships travelling to and from Asia.



Ou walk continued to the harbour, in non Covid times this would be such a busy place with tourists, today only local people were out and about enjoying the sunshine.



The second son of Queen Victoria, Prince Alfred visited the Cape Colony harbour in 1860 as a sixteen-year-old Royal Navy Midshipman. He made a big splash with the colonials on this first-ever visit by a member of the Royal Family. The first basin of the new Navy Yard was named after him and the second after his mother.



The Clock Tower was once the Port Captain’s Office, built-in 1882, today it’s a tourism hub & where you can take boat tours to Robben Island,where Nelson Mandela was held prisoner for so many years.

We saw a contemporary stone replica outline of Mandela’s prison cell with window railings.



We were lucky that the swing bridge was about to open to let a small ship pass by.

The V & A Swing Bridge connects the Clock Tower precinct to the rest of the Waterfront for pedestrians, designed to support about 600 people and can operate in wind speeds of up to 80 kph.



This was my third tour of Cape Town and I’m enjoying finding out the history, but my next tour is at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden so fingers crossed it will be another sunny day.

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