Wednesday · September · 30 · 2026
“Time goes, you say? Ah no, alas, time stays, we go.”
— Henry Austin Dobson
Sun & daylight
The sun rises at 06:26 and sets at 18:48 in Cape Town today, giving 12h 22m of daylight. Solar noon is at 12:37.
06:26
Sunrise
12:37
Noon
18:48
Sunset
Midnight
00:37
Sunrise
06:26
Solar noon
12:37
Sunset
18:48
Solar midnight
00:37
Daylight
12h 22m
Daylight runs about 9h 53m around the June solstice and 14h 24m around the December solstice.
Daylight saving time
Cape Town does not observe daylight saving time. Clocks stay on UTC+2 all year, so the local time never shifts with the seasons.
Public holidays
South Africa has 1 public holiday in September 2026.
Architecture
Cape Town builds under Table Mountain and along a working harbour, and its recent architecture has gone into the old port, converting what the docks left behind. The mountain settles most arguments about scale.
Completed 2018
dhk Architects
An art museum and sculpture garden on the edge of a wetland below the Constantiaberg mountains. dhk set a low block of galleries under a thin oversailing roof, heavy-walled to protect the art and open on the garden side to the vineyards and the mountain beyond, so the building frames the landscape as much as it holds the collection. A restored wetland runs along one side. It is a quiet box that spends its architecture on the views out of it.
Completed 2017
Heatherwick Studio
A museum of contemporary African art carved out of a disused grain silo on the waterfront. Heatherwick's studio cut a gallery through the concrete tubes of the silo by slicing the shape of a corn grain out of the solid mass, leaving the cuts raw so the atrium reads as a cathedral hollowed from the block. The old structure is kept and gutted at once. The largest museum built in Africa in a century, it saved the tallest thing on the harbour by emptying it.
Completed 2014
dhk Architects
The tallest building in Cape Town, on the edge of the business district. dhk gave it a slender crystalline form in double-glazed glass that changes with the light off the harbour and the mountain, and made it the greenest tall building in the country with a five-star environmental rating. The verticality is the whole gesture. The tower earns its height by staying thin and reflecting the setting rather than blocking it.
Completed 2010
gmp Architekten
A stadium built for the 2010 World Cup between the harbour and the mountain, on the old Green Point common. The German firm gmp wrapped the bowl in a translucent mesh that glows softly at night and reads as a low disc against Table Mountain rather than a mass, sized to sit under the skyline it shares. A glazed roof shelters the stands. It was placed on the city's most visible site and shaped so as not to fight the mountain behind it.
Completed 1679
Dutch East India Company
A five-pointed stone fort near the harbour, and the oldest surviving colonial building in South Africa. The Dutch East India Company built it as a supply station and garrison in the shape of a star, five bastions of stone and brick around a central court, replacing an earlier earthwork on what was then the shoreline. The sea has since been pushed back by reclamation. It is where the colonial history of the country begins, kept as a museum of exactly that.