The City Bowl is the historical and commercial heart of Cape Town, the flat amphitheatre of streets cupped between Table Mountain, Devil's Peak, Signal Hill and the Foreshore. This is where Cape Town began — the Dutch East India Company fort, the Company's Garden, the slave lodge, the first church — and most of what survives of that founding centuries is still walkable within a tight triangle of streets around the Grand Parade.
The CBD can feel gritty on the edges — Long Street, Buitenkant Street — and parts of the lower Foreshore are bleaker still, especially around the central station. But the core, from Greenmarket Square along Government Avenue to the museum district near the Gardens, is one of the more rewarding stretches of urban heritage walking in South Africa. The South African Museum, the National Gallery, the Holocaust and Jewish museums, the Planetarium, and the Slave Lodge are all within a few hundred metres of each other.
After dark the energy consolidates on Long Street, which runs from the top of the city centre down toward the waterfront and is the densest concentration of bars, restaurants, bookshops and backpacker hostels in the city. The Bo-Kaap neighbourhood climbs Signal Hill directly above, and the Company's Garden — a long green corridor through the centre — remains the city's best free lunchtime escape.