Cape Town – Between Sea and History

After Johannesburg, Cape Town immediately feels like a different country.
Brighter, more orderly, more tourist-oriented. The ocean opens the view, the mountain holds it in place, and everything seems to move with a lighter rhythm. It is a beautiful city, undeniably so, and visibly wealthier—at least on the surface.

And yet, after a few days, something lingers in the air.
A subtle unease, never shouted. Houses surrounded by fences, often electrified. Repeated advice: don’t walk around too much, stay within the tourist areas. Nothing overtly threatening—we never had any problems—but enough to remind you that this beauty coexists with an unresolved past.

If you look closely, traces of the apartheid era are still there. Not as a distant memory, but as a structure that hasn’t fully disappeared: in spatial divisions, in visible inequalities, in boundaries—both physical and invisible—that still run through the city. The sea and the mountain seem to soften these contrasts, but they cannot erase them.

Cape Town lives suspended between sea and history.
A city that fascinates and, at the same time, holds back. That welcomes you, but cautiously.
And perhaps it is precisely this tension—between beauty and memory, openness and defense—that makes it so complex to capture.