Observatory — "Obs" to everyone who lives there — is Cape Town's scruffy, creative, student-heavy quarter, wedged between the city centre and the Southern Suburbs near the slopes of Devil's Peak. Named for the Royal Observatory established here in 1820, it grew up as a Victorian railway suburb and kept its grid of narrow streets and small terraced cottages, many now painted in bright colours and draped in bougainvillea. Its proximity to the University of Cape Town and a teaching hospital gives it a young, alternative, faintly counter-cultural feel.
Lower Main Road is the spine of the neighbourhood, a strip of secondhand bookshops, vintage clothing stores, vegetarian cafés, live-music venues and late-opening bars that draw students and artists from across the city. The neighbouring pockets of Rosebank and Mowbray share the same studenty character, while above them Devil's Peak and the Rhodes Memorial — a granite monument to the empire-builder Cecil John Rhodes, with one of the best free views over the Cape Flats — mark the edge of the mountain.
It is not a polished tourist district, and that is the point. Come for the bohemian street life, the cheap and varied food, the bookshops and the nightlife, and for a side of Cape Town that has nothing to do with beaches or boutique hotels.