Camps Bay

Lia and I arrived in Camps Bay at the worst possible hour to find parking — golden hour on a Saturday, when it feels like half of Cape Town has had the same idea. We finally gave up and left the car near the Glen Country Club, walking the last ten minutes down toward Victoria Road with our sandals in hand. Nothing about that walk prepared me for the first proper view of the beach: the Twelve Apostles rearing straight up behind the sand, close enough that they seemed to be leaning over the town to check the surf.

We’d read that swimming here is a bit of a trick question, and the lifeguards weren’t shy about confirming it — red flags up, whistles going off at anyone drifting too far from shore. The Atlantic off Camps Bay is genuinely cold, colder than either of us expected for a beach this glamorous, and the rip currents apparently catch out a few overconfident swimmers every summer. So we did what everyone else seemed to be doing instead: waded in to the knees, yelped, retreated, and called it a swim.

What Camps Bay is actually for, we figured out fast, is the promenade itself. Victoria Road has been drawing people down from central Cape Town since it was finished in 1886, and the string of restaurants and bars along it still runs on that same logic — come for the view, stay because leaving feels wrong. We ended up at a spot with a second-floor terrace, ordering way too much grilled kingklip and watching the sun drop behind the water while the mountains behind us went from grey to rust to that impossible pink. Lia kept saying it looked fake, like a screensaver, and I couldn’t really argue.

We stayed until the palms along the promenade lit up and the beach crowd thinned into a dinner crowd, everyone still in swimwear and salt-crusted hair, nobody in a hurry. It’s an unapologetically flashy stretch of coast, and I mean that as a compliment — Camps Bay has been the fashionable end of Cape Town for well over a century, and it still knows exactly how to put on a show at dusk.

When to go: Aim for December to March, Cape Town’s summer, when the days are warm enough to actually want that cold Atlantic water — even if, like us, you only get as far as your knees.