Fascinating Tourist Activities in Cape Town for History Lovers

While traditional tourist activities often focus on beaches and cable cars, the V&A Waterfront provides one of the region's densest concentrations of historical attractions: several centuries of maritime history, apartheid-era memory and contemporary African art within a single walkable neighbourhood.

Nobel Square is free and always open. Four bronze statues of the country's Nobel Peace Prize laureates stand where the harbour meets the city. A short walk away, the Nelson Mandela Gateway in the triple-storey building at the Clock Tower Precinct holds a trove of Madiba’s life in the form of artefacts and personal items. This is also where ferries depart for Robben Island at 9am, 11am, 1pm and 3pm, weather permitting. The Robben Island tour is a fully guided experience and runs roughly 3.5 to 4 hours, including the ferry crossing.

The self-guided V&A Waterfront Audio Tour, ‘Reinventing the Tavern of the Seas,’ is free and available through the VoiceMap app whenever you are. It runs about 45 to 75 minutes over roughly 1.9 kilometres with stops that include Seal Landing, the Robinson Dry Dock (the oldest operating cobblestone dry dock still in active service globally, dating to 1882), Ferryman's Tavern, The Watershed, and Contours of the Cape (otherwise known as the giant Cape Town sign), where each letter represents a distinct local mountain peak or range. Each stop traces how the working harbour became the neighbourhood standing here today.

For an in-person hosted tour, V&A Waterfront Orientation Tour swaps the app for a knowledgeable guide and takes visitors around in The Green Cab's 100% electric vehicles, driven by women drivers. It's a paid, one-hour experience covering the precinct's landmarks, hidden heritage, public art, food hubs and sustainability initiatives, with departures daily between 9am and 3pm, every 90 minutes, from between Time Out Market and The Watershed entrance on Dock Road.

The Cape Town Diamond Museum, also home to the Shimansky Diamond Experience, sits in the Clock Tower precinct and is child-friendly.The facility offers a guided 45-minute tour detailing 3.3 billion years of diamond history, with advance booking recommended for optimal access.

Zeitz MOCAA's building tells its own story before a single artwork comes into view; architect Thomas Heatherwick carved a cathedral-like atrium out of a 1920s grain silo, with glass bubbles pushing through the roof and windows. Nearby, the Clock Tower and the working Alfred Basin sit as some of the precinct's oldest surviving structures, still functioning much as they did over a century ago.

Smaller galleries round out the neighbourhood's art scene and count among the best cultural things to do in Cape Town. Berman Contemporary, Everard Read, and CIRCA galleries all showcase South African and African artists in intimate settings, providing highly curated exhibitions.

Creativity is part of everyday life in the neighbourhood, seen in the V&A Waterfront’s museums and galleries, public art, live performance, and the local talent that brings shared spaces to life.