The Table Bay Hotel at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town has created a partnership with Reclaim Camissa, a local non-profit trust, to offer guests a new experience to discover the history of Cape Town and the surrounding area by means of a walking tour.
The Camissa Walk takes an hour and a half and ends at The Table Bay’s Camissa restaurant where guests can sample a South African-inspired meal.
During the walk, guests will follow the water’s course from the mountain, through mills, wash houses, the shrines of local saints and other forgotten landmarks, to discover the earliest roots of the city of Cape Town. The walk begins uphill at De Grendel, from where the original main water supply into the city was controlled after the Dutch settlement.
From there, guests will stop en-route at the Lower Platterklip Waterfall, The Platteklip Dam and Mill, the Wash Houses and eventually The Old Oranjezicht Farmstead. For the adventurous, the tour can include an additional experience where guests enter underground tunnels that carry the old river to the moat of the Castle of Good Hope.
Sherwin Banda, General Manager at the Table Bay Hotel says: “Camissa, ‘the place of sweet waters’ is the original Khoi name for Cape Town and the reason we named our latest restaurant. We also wanted to give our guests the opportunity to discover Cape Town’s cultural and environmental heritage and to learn more about the role of water in the city landscape, linking mountain to sea, past to future and people to the environment.”
The tour will be guided by Caron von Zeil from Reclaim Camissa and has been developed in conjunction with events and team-building company, Fo8, which leads the tunnel portion of the tour, providing gumboots, headlamps and other necessary equipment.
