Cape Town

Table Mountain formed roughly 260 million years before the Himalayas existed, a difference in age so large it's genuinely difficult to picture in human terms — the mountain was already ancient before most of the geological processes that built the world's younger mountain ranges had even started. It was named one of the New7Wonders of Nature in 2011, and the flat-topped sandstone massif still dominates Cape Town's skyline from nearly every part of the city, a physical anchor the city has planned much of its layout and views around.

Robben Island, visible from the V&A Waterfront and reachable by a roughly 30-minute ferry, carries a very different kind of weight. Used as a prison for more than 300 years, it's most associated with Nelson Mandela, who spent 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment under apartheid there. Tours of the island, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, are frequently led by former political prisoners, giving visitors a direct, firsthand account rather than a purely curated museum narrative.

The Cape Peninsula stretches south from the city toward the Cape of Good Hope, and the drive down it passes some of the more dramatic coastal scenery anywhere on the continent, including Chapman's Peak Drive's cliffside route and Boulders Beach, home to a colony of African penguins that nest right among the beachgoers rather than in some separate reserve.

Inland from the city, the Cape Winelands around Stellenbosch and Franschhoek hold some of the Southern Hemisphere's oldest and most respected wine estates, many dating to Dutch and French Huguenot settlement in the late 1600s, and a day trip out from Cape Town is a standard extension for visitors with an extra day or two.

Cape Town's Mediterranean climate, genuinely unusual for its latitude on the African continent, gives it warm, dry summers from November through March and wetter, windier winters the rest of the year, a pattern shaped by its position where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet near the southern tip of Africa.