Cape town, South Africa

#100waysoftravel #capetown #southafrica The first settlement in Cape Town was located between Table Mountain and Table Bay. The city was bounded to the northwest by the mountains known as Lion's Head and Lion's Rump (later called Signal Hill), to the north by Table Bay, to the south by Devil's Peak, and to the east by the swampy area and the sandy Cape Flats beyond. The nearest agricultural land was on the lower eastern slopes of Devil's Peak and Table Mountain and, further southeast, at Rondebosch, Newlands, and Wynberg. From the forts protecting the settlement, a track led south across these lands to False Bay on the eastern side of the Cape Peninsula and onwards past Muizenberg and Kalk Bay to Simon's Bay, where East Indiamen could find shelter from the winter winds from the northwest. 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 development. A railway reached Wynberg in 1864 and Muizenberg in 1883, and another line ran eastward from Cape Town across the Flats into the interior.