(Credit: ChrisRiccoPhoto – @ShootMyCT – Instagram)
Powertime showcase the Best shots of South African cities at night #PowerYourCity.
Are you on Instagram or Twitter? Use #PowerYourCity in all of your pictures of South African cities at night to stand a chance to be featured on our home page website. This week, thank you to @ShootMyCT for his amazing shot of Cape Town!
“Fog rolling in over Cape Town” – The beauty of Cape Town at night
The Mother City is always surprising. It reveals another side of its beauty at night when the lights start shining, and the fog add to its mysterious and unexpected character.
10 Funny facts about Cape Town:
- Cape Town is sometimes called the “Tavern of the seas”. The Port of Cape Town is deemed to be one of the busiest shipping corridors in the world.
- Cape Town is South Africa’s tobogganing hub: aptly titled Cool Runnings after the film about Jamaica’s first bobsled team, you’ll find the track just 25km outside of the city centre on Carl Cronje Drive.
- Two couples get hitched on Table Mountain every month.
- The Castle of Good Hope once had a sea view. Cape Town’s famous landmark the Castle of Good Hope is the oldest colonial building in South Africa, having been built between 1666 and 1679. The structure, which was once a fort, served as a welcoming port for sailors travelling around the Cape – an often arduous journey.
- Lion’s Head wasn’t actually named for its felines. The story goes that during the 17th century Dutch settlers named the peak Leeuwen Kop (Lion’s Head) and its adjacent summit Leeuwen Staart (Lion’s Tail aka Signal Hill as it’s known today). It was thought that the space between the two peaks is suggestive of a crouching lion.
- The Cape Peninsula was originally known as the Cape of Storms by legendary explorer Bartholomew Dias. Later, it became known as the Cape of Good Hope because it offered colonial powers the promise of a sea route to the East.
- Afrikaans is the most widely spoken language in the Western Cape, despite being one of the youngest languages in the world.
- Cape Town was appointed the best place in the world to visit by the New York Times in 2014.
- We’re all young here! The 2011 national census reports that almost half (43.2%) of the Western Cape’s population is below the age of 25.
- Cape Town is the most equal city in South Africa. Though the ANC and DA might never come to consensus over who will most effectively run the Western Cape, both the UN-Habitat’s (the United Nations agency for human settlement) 2010/11 and 2012/2013 State of the World’s Cities reports concluded that Cape Town is the most equal of all South African cities.