South Africa · Western Cape · Cape Town
Gardens, Cape Town — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Gardens is a leafy residential suburb of Cape Town, filling the slope of the City Bowl between the town centre and Table Mountain. It borrows its name from the Company's Garden, the old Dutch East India Company vegetable plot that greens its lower edge. Kloof Street is its spine. Along it and the quiet side roads sit Victorian houses, small guesthouses, and a run of museums that draw daytime visitors up from the harbour.
About Gardens
Where to stay in Gardens
Not every neighbourhood fits every trip — here's what each one is good for.
Staying in Gardens puts you within a short walk of the Company's Garden and its museums, yet a step back from the noise of the central business district. The suburb runs to guesthouses, boutique hotels, and serviced Victorian houses along Kloof Street and the roads that branch off it. It suits sightseers.
Days can start with the Iziko South African Museum or the South African National Gallery and end with dinner on Kloof Street, before the climb back uphill to a quiet bed below Table Mountain. Those wanting beach or nightlife will find Sea Point and the harbour a short taxi ride away.
About Gardens
What are the main landmarks in Gardens?
The Company's Garden anchors the suburb's museum quarter at its lower end. The Iziko South African Museum, with its natural-history and San rock-art halls, stands beside the garden's oak avenue, and the South African National Gallery faces it across the lawns. A short walk east, on Hatfield Street, the South African Jewish Museum and the Cape Town Holocaust Centre share a single walled precinct.
Between them, benches and fountains fill the old planted grounds. It is an easy morning on foot.
What is the history of Gardens?
The Company's Garden began in 1652 as a vegetable plot laid out by the Dutch East India Company to reprovision ships rounding the Cape. The passing fleets ate from its beds. As the settlement climbed the slope over the following centuries, the ground above the garden was divided into plots, and the residential suburb that rose there kept the garden's name.
Victorian and Edwardian villas, churches, and schools filled its streets during the nineteenth century. Government Avenue, the oak walk through the garden, has carried strollers between the town and the mountain for generations.
Where is Gardens?
The suburb occupies the upper City Bowl, the natural amphitheatre that Cape Town's centre fills below Table Mountain. Tamboerskloof rises to its west, while Oranjezicht and Vredehoek climb the slope to its east and the business district lies downhill to the north. The land steepens fast.
At its northern foot the Company's Garden separates the suburb from the old town centre.
Good for
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Updated July 2026