Bo-Kaap, the Company's Garden and the City Bowl

You can see the historic heart of Cape Town on foot in a single morning. Start on the cobbled slopes of Signal Hill in the Bo-Kaap, walk down across Bree Street into the shade of the Company's Garden, and finish with lunch or coffee on Kloof Street.

1. The Bo-Kaap

Rising up the hillside along Wale, Chiappini and Rose streets, the Bo-Kaap ("Above the Cape") is the historic home of the Cape Malay community, descendants of enslaved people, artisans, scholars and political exiles brought by the Dutch East India Company from Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Madagascar and East Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries. During apartheid, while neighbouring District Six was bulldozed, the Bo-Kaap survived intact as a designated Muslim area.

• What to see: start at the small Bo-Kaap Museum on Wale Street, housed in one of the oldest buildings in the neighbourhood (dating to the 1760s), then walk past the Auwal Mosque on Dorp Street, founded in 1794 as the first mosque in South Africa, where Tuan Guru wrote out copies of the Quran entirely from memory after his imprisonment on Robben Island. Pick up freshly fried samoosas, koesisters (spiced doughnuts rolled in desiccated coconut) and curry masalas at Atlas Trading Company on Wale Street.
• Respect the residents: these pastel pink, lime green and cobalt blue terraces are private family homes, not a film set. Stay off front stoops (porches), do not peer through windows, and dress respectfully, especially on Fridays around midday prayer.

2. Bree, Shortmarket and Long Streets

Walk downhill from the Bo-Kaap onto Bree Street, which has overtaken Long Street as the City Bowl's best strip for independent bakeries, wine bars, design studios and lunch spots. Two blocks over, Long Street still keeps its ornate Victorian wrought-iron balconies and second-hand bookshops. A few minutes east sits the District Six Museum on Buitenkant Street, housed in a former Methodist church where photographs, street signs and a giant floor map mark the homes of the sixty thousand residents forcibly removed after 1966.

3. The Company's Garden

Originally planted by the Dutch in the 1650s to grow fresh vegetables and fruit for ships rounding the cape, the Company's Garden is now a leafy public park running up toward the mountain. Squirrels dart across the paths past a 17th-century saffron pear tree, rose gardens, the Houses of Parliament, the Iziko Slave Lodge and the Iziko South African Museum at the top end.