Five days in Cape Town: a mountain in the middle and a prison in the bay

Steep cobbled streets of flat-fronted houses painted lime, pink and cobalt, with the Auwal Mosque of 1794, the oldest in the country, halfway up Dorp Street. It is a residential neighbourhood and not a film set, so photograph the houses from the street rather than the doorstep.

One house on Wale Street, built in the 1760s and furnished as a Cape Muslim family home of the nineteenth century. Small, cheap and one of the very few places that tells this community's story from the inside. Closes at 17:00.

The ridge running north from the mountain, low enough to drive to the top of and high enough for the view to be worth it. Locals bring blankets and wine an hour before sunset. The gun that fires across the city at noon every day sits on this slope.

Bobotie, denningvleis, samoosas and koeksisters. The old restaurants in the quarter do not serve alcohol, which nobody minds and everybody should be told in advance.

A sandstone plateau about 1,085 m at its highest point, reached by a cable car whose floor rotates through a full turn on the way up so that everyone gets every view. Take a windproof layer even in February: the top is routinely fifteen degrees colder and twice as windy as the car park.

A granite terrace on the slope of Devil's Peak, finished in 1912, with forty-nine steps, eight bronze lions and a bust of Cecil Rhodes looking out over the Cape Flats. Nobody agrees about whether it should still be here, which makes the view and the argument roughly equal in interest.

There is a tea garden under the pines behind the terrace, with tables looking east over the suburbs. Otherwise the botanical garden below has a restaurant of its own and you can push lunch back an hour.

Founded in 1913 on the mountain's eastern flank and planted almost entirely with South African species: proteas, a cycad amphitheatre, a stretch of fynbos and a steel walkway that curves up through the tree canopy. Give it two hours and take the walkway last, when the afternoon light comes through sideways.

Seven kilometres offshore, a prison from the seventeenth century onwards and a maximum security jail for opponents of apartheid until 1991. A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999. Allow three and a half hours for the whole thing, book well ahead, and bring a hat: there is no shade anywhere on it.

In the mall on the waterfront and much better than that suggests. Line-caught fish, oysters and sushi at prices that would be a mistake to convert into euros in front of a local.

Forty-two concrete grain tubes with an atrium carved out of the middle of them, opened in 2017 as the largest museum of contemporary African art anywhere. The building is worth the ticket on its own; go up to the roof terrace before you leave.

A working harbour that turned into the city's shopping and eating district in the 1990s, named for Queen Victoria and her second son. Seals on the pontoons, buskers, and a swing bridge that stops the traffic every time a yacht comes through.

A sheltered cove of granite boulders where African penguins have nested since 1982. Boardwalks keep you off the sand and about two metres from the birds. They are loud, they smell, and they are completely unbothered by you.

On the water in the naval town north of the penguins, big enough to seat you without a booking and unfussy about sandy feet. Fish and chips, a harbour full of frigates, and the drive south still ahead of you.

The rocky headland at the southwestern tip of the continent, with a sign everybody queues to photograph. It is not the southernmost point of Africa, which is Cape Agulhas 150 km east, and the two oceans do not meet here either. The walk down to the beach is still one of the best half hours on this coast.

Two kilometres east of the headland, a cliff with the old lighthouse of 1859 on top, built so high up that it spent half the year inside a cloud. A funicular runs to it, or you walk up in fifteen minutes. Baboons work the car park and will open an unlocked car, so leave nothing on the seats.

In a former Methodist church on the edge of the ground it commemorates. About 60,000 people were removed from this quarter after 1966 and their houses bulldozed. The floor is a hand-annotated street map that former residents write their old addresses onto, and the guides are usually people who lived here.

Built in 1679 by the Dutch East India Company to hold the people it enslaved, later a courthouse, now a museum about slavery at the Cape and the systems that followed it. One of the oldest buildings in the country and the least comfortable.

The street where the city eats: bakeries, wine bars and small kitchens, most of them a few years old and none of them expensive. Twenty minutes to the airport afterwards, or forty in the evening rush.