Cape Town: Working Waterfront

Cape Town's waterfront is extensive and is perhaps the City's foremost tourist destination, but what is really unique is how the working elements of the harbor, like the drydocks shown above, are seamlessly woven into the publicly accessible tourist areas. Three Leading Hotels of the World properties, at least three high-end shopping malls, and countless restaurants, souvenir shops, and tourist cruises are scattered throughout the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. Sitting at restaurants you watch barges and cranes come and go. Walking the piers you see fishing boats coming in to drop their daily catch. From $500+ per night hotel rooms and multimillion dollar apartments you have a gorgeous view of the ocean or Table Mountain, with a boat repair facility in the foreground. And this isn't just cutesy remnants of olden days; rather, gritty industrial business is still thriving in the middle of this high value real estate. In most other waterfront cities around the world, new residential and commercial construction displaces the industrial trades to faraway edges or more blue collar towns, but in Cape Town, there is a very intentional mix that creates a really fascinating place to walk around day after day.