We Capture the Castle! - A Heritage Walking Tour through the Castle of Good Hope

Name: We Capture the Castle! - A Heritage Walking Tour through the Castle of Good Hope
Start: 2025-02-09T14:00:00+02:00
End: 2025-02-09T16:00:00+02:00
Location: Castle of Good Hope

Schedule

Sun Feb 09 2025 at 02:00 pm to 04:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Castle of Good Hope | Cape Town, WC

There is no building in South African history - perhaps any nation's history - more powerfully symbolic or more painfully contested than the Castle of Good Hope.
With the recent evictions at the Strand Street bastion, the colonial fortress has found itself back in the news cycle as both an icon of our Republic's urban decay and a cruel remnant of the displacement and destruction of indigenous life that lasted for more than 300 years after its first stone was laid (and which we thought had abated for a change).
Voices rose to recognise the exalted heritage of the site to the South African Saga while counter-voices rightfully declaimed it as the Kremlin of white minority rule, a mocking mausoleum for a slowburn genocide. But what do you know about it? How often have you been inside? Have you had the chance yet to explore its strangest chambers?
Over 100,000 local schoolkids, along with bevies of business conferences, Indonesian consulates, Netflix film crews, platteland Afrikaners and nerdy Nederlanders visit it every year but it is almost utterly ignored by Capetonians themselves, who stand to learn and feel the most from visiting.
As such I want to invite you to be brave and curious enough to join me for a thorough wander and delve into a city within the city.
It will be impossible for me to pussyfoot around anything. Just as Cape Town is the world in one city, the Castle is the nucleus of South Africa. In minutes you can walk from art galleries to torture chambers, rococo fountains to venemous arsenals, glinting silver dining halls to bronze statues of imprisoned chiefs.
Like Robben Island, it is an international monument to a dead empire and a tourist site whose resonances are still far from being fully heard.
By the end of the tour I hope you'll agree that if the Castle can be reclaimed for ordinary South Africans, surely the rest of the country will follow...
As always, we can't wait to blow your minds x
Yours,
Cameron of CTHT
P.S. If you've read this far I'm guessing you'll want even more of the specs, so here goes:
- We'll be starting by the 'Leeuhek Gate' main entrance to the Castle at 14h00 on Sunday afternoon and finishing in the main courtyard just over 2 hours later so happily park in the main visitors' lot off Darling Street or on the Grand Parade itself.
- We used to be donation-based but to secure our future we're now doing a pre-booking system whereby you can guarantee your tickets beforehand at R150pp (including R50 entrance for adults, R25 for children and pensioners) or you can join the tour on the day for R200pp in cash or SnapScan or EFT et al. Simply WhatsApp us on 076 033 8164 or Message us via the buttons on our home page or email us at [email protected] to secure your place.
- This is a consistently well-reviewed heritage-focused walking tour; which is to say that all you'll need to enjoy yourself is curiosity about Cape Town's past (and History in general) and enough stamina to walk just less than 2km in two hours.
- If you're rejoining us, please please please please please please consider dropping us a short (or extensive) review on our Facebook Reviews or Google Reviews section or TripAdvisor as it will help spread our gospel of curiosity and playful appreciation across the internet and across the spectrum of all potential visitors to the Cape. It helps us more than you can believe!
- We've also introduced an optional R10 donation on your ticket which will go directly to the NGO Streetscapes as part of our mission to spread love, enthusiasm, mutual support and respect for all of Cape Town's people and histories. Just think how many people we could help and the difference we could make with a few hundred tours!
- Feel absolutely free to spread the word, invite friends who've been looking for this kind of experience and badger us with every imaginable heritage query.
We live for it!
Can't wait to meet ya 🙂