South Africa Guide
Cape Town
Cape Point
Cape Point is the treacherous promontory of rocks, winds and swells braved by navigators since the Portuguese first "rounded the Cape" in the fifteenth century. Plenty of wrecks lie submerged off its coast, and at Olifantsbos on the west side you can walk to a US ship sunk in 1942, and a South African coaster which ran aground in 1965. The Old Lighthouse, built in 1860, was too often dangerously shrouded in cloud, and failed to keep ships off the rocks, so another was built lower down in 1914, not always successful in averting disasters, but still the most powerful light beaming onto the sea from South Africa.