Company's Garden

The Company's Garden is Cape Town's oldest green space — established in 1652 by Jan van Riebeeck as a vegetable garden to supply fresh produce to Dutch East India Company ships rounding the Cape, and now a formal garden in the centre of the city that is surrounded by the South African Parliament, the South African Museum, the National Gallery, and the South African Library. The garden's origin as a resupply station for colonial trade routes is the founding act of Cape Town itself — the city exists because ships needed vegetables.

The garden contains mature oak trees, rose beds, a fish pond, and an avenue of camphor trees that were planted in the 17th century and are now among the oldest cultivated trees in South Africa. The South African Museum, on the garden's western edge, houses natural history and cultural collections that include San rock art, dinosaur fossils, and the Whale Well (a space containing suspended whale skeletons). The South African National Gallery, at the garden's southern end, has an excellent collection of South African art.

The garden's location in the parliamentary precinct means it's surrounded by the institutions of South African democracy, and the walk from the garden through Government Avenue to the Mount Nelson Hotel (Cape Town's most storied colonial-era hotel, known as 'the Nellie') provides a compressed tour of the city's political and social history. The squirrels in the garden are tame enough to eat from visitors' hands, which is either charming or a pest-management failure depending on your perspective.