Time Out named it the Best City in the World in 2025 and placed it sixth globally in 2026, ahead of Mexico City, Bangkok, Seoul, and Tokyo. The World Travel Awards gave it Africa's Leading City Destination for 2026. Condé Nast readers voted it the World's Best Food City, beating Tokyo, Rome, and Porto. Its airport has been named the best in the world.
And most travelers still haven't been. Cape Town is not undiscovered in the sense of being unknown. It is the most decorated city on earth that almost nobody you know has visited.
Acclaimed, Not Crowded
Here's the gap that makes Cape Town worth your flight. Cape Town International handled around 11.1 million passengers in 2025, a number that includes every domestic business traveler and connecting passenger. The city's own tourism targets are to grow visitor numbers beyond five million.
Compare that to the European cities people default to. Paris, Rome, and Barcelona operate at a scale that makes five million look like a rounding error. Cape Town wins the awards and keeps the elbow room.
The practical effect shows up everywhere. You can hike Table Mountain in the morning, eat at one of Africa's best restaurants at lunch, be on a Clifton beach by three with space around your towel, and reach a Constantia wine estate for sunset. In a European city with comparable acclaim, two of those four would involve a queue and a reservation made weeks out.
Image of Table Mountain, Cape Town
The Views Are the Real Thing
Table Mountain is one of the New7Wonders of Nature, and the thing that photographs cannot convey is the scale relative to the city. No other major city on the planet has a natural landmark of that size at its center. It frames every street, every beach, and every meal.
The city sits inside the Cape Floral Kingdom, one of the world's six floral kingdoms and the smallest and richest of them per unit of area. That is not travel-brochure language. It means the vegetation on the slopes above the city exists nowhere else on earth.
Beyond the mountain: Chapman's Peak Drive cut into the cliffs above the Atlantic, Cape Point where the peninsula runs out, Boulders Beach with its colony of endangered African penguins, Lion's Head for the sunset hike, and twelve Apostles running down the coast.
Image of Boulders Beach in Cape Town, South Africa
The Food, and Specifically the Meat
Cape Town has 66 restaurants holding Eat Out stars in 2026, and six of the eight restaurants awarded three stars nationally sit in the Western Cape. Three Cape Town restaurants appear on the World's 50 Best extended list, and every South African entry on that list belongs to Cape Town. La Colombe in Constantia ranks as the best in Africa. FYN in the city center builds a kaiseki-style menu from indigenous ingredients.
For meat, this is one of the great cities on earth. The braai is a national institution rather than a cooking method, and the range runs well past beef: springbok, kudu, ostrich, and game cuts that are difficult to find anywhere else, alongside boerewors, biltong, and a steakhouse culture built on genuinely good local beef and lamb from the Karoo.
The Cape Malay tradition adds a second layer: bobotie, curries, and koeksisters, a cuisine with no equivalent anywhere, shaped by four centuries of Indonesian, Malaysian, and Cape history.
Image of Braai
The Winelands Are Half an Hour Away
Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, and Constantia all sit within about 45 minutes of the city, producing Chenin Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinotage, and Cape blends at prices that make European wine tourism look like a swindle.
The food follows the wine. Stellenbosch and Franschhoek together hold 19 starred restaurants in the 2026 Eat Out rankings, which is more than any single part of Cape Town itself. A day trip to the Winelands is not a side excursion. For many visitors it becomes the best day of the trip.
Image of Stellenbosch, South Africa
A Base for Southern Africa
Worth being precise here, because Cape Town sits at the bottom of a very large continent. It is not a practical base for exploring Africa broadly. Lagos, Cairo, and Nairobi are as far from Cape Town as they are from Europe.
What it is, is an excellent base for Southern Africa, which is the part of the continent most travelers want anyway. The Garden Route starts at the doorstep and runs east through what is widely considered the safest region in the country. Hermanus is close enough for a day trip during southern right whale season. Gansbaai is the shark cage diving capital. Flights reach Victoria Falls, Windhoek for Namibia, Johannesburg for Kruger safaris, and Maputo.
The standard itinerary that works: Cape Town and the Winelands for a week, Garden Route by car, then a flight to a safari. Few cities make that kind of trip this easy to assemble.
Image of Cape Town, South Africa
The Value Is Not Subtle
The rand converts favourably against the dollar and the pound, and the gap between what you pay and what you get is the thing returning visitors talk about most. Fine dining, boutique hotels, wine tasting, and private guides all sit at a price point that would be considered mid-range in Europe or North America.
This is also what makes Cape Town workable for longer stays. A month here costs what a week costs in several of the cities it outranks on those best-city lists.
The Honest Caveats
A piece arguing Cape Town is underrated loses credibility if it skips this, so here it is plainly.
Crime is real and it is not evenly distributed. The US State Department rates South Africa Level 2, Exercise Increased Caution, with specific mention of crime in Cape Town. Numbeo's 2026 crime index places Cape Town 16th globally. What those numbers obscure is that the violent crime driving them is heavily concentrated in the Cape Flats townships, where gang conflict produces the homicide rate, and those are areas visitors have no reason to go.
The tourist corridor is a different environment. The V&A Waterfront, Camps Bay, Clifton, Sea Point, Bo-Kaap, and the Cape Peninsula are well patrolled, busy, and generally safe. The practical rules that locals give visitors: use Uber rather than public transport, treat the city centre with caution after dark, never hike Table Mountain or Lion's Head alone since trail muggings do happen, and keep valuables out of sight.
Load shedding still happens. Scheduled power cuts continue to affect the country. Check that your accommodation has generator backup, download the EskomSePush app for the schedule, and carry some cash, since card machines lose connectivity during higher stages.
Neither of these makes Cape Town a bad idea. They make it a city you travel in with your eyes open rather than on autopilot.
So Why Hasn't Everyone Been?
Three reasons, and none of them is that the city disappoints.
Distance. It's a long flight from North America and Europe, and long-haul inertia is real. People book the place that's six hours away.
The safari assumption. Most people's mental model of African travel is wildlife, not a coastal city with a fine dining scene and a wine region. Cape Town does not fit the category, so it never enters the shortlist.
Crime headlines. South Africa's crime statistics are national and they are bad. The nuance that the tourist corridor operates differently does not travel well in a headline.
The result is a city that wins the awards and stays navigable. That combination does not usually last. Barcelona, Lisbon, and Prague all had it once.
The Verdict
Cape Town is not overrated. It is the rare destination where the acclaim has run ahead of the visitor numbers, which means you get a globally ranked city without the globally ranked crowds.
Go before that gap closes. Travel sensibly, stay in the main corridor, and the trip will outperform the expectations you arrived with.
Practical Notes
- Best season: The Southern Hemisphere flips the calendar. November to March is Cape Town's summer and peak season. Shoulder months either side give you good weather with fewer people.
- Getting around: Rent a car for the peninsula and the Winelands. Use Uber in the city. Avoid public transport.
- Table Mountain: The cableway closes in high wind, and the weather turns fast. Build flexibility into which day you go up.
- Book the top restaurants ahead. They are cheap by international standards, not easy to walk into.
- Check current travel advice from your own government before booking.
Staying Connected
Cape Town travel runs on Uber, maps for the peninsula drive, restaurant bookings, and load shedding schedules. All of it needs data. An eSIM gets you online the moment you land at an airport that keeps winning awards, without a SIM counter queue after a long-haul flight.
Heading to the Mother City? Get connected before you land.
Get Your eSIM from Globie →The Bottom Line
Cape Town is the most awarded city most people still haven't visited. Table Mountain at its centre, the Cape Floral Kingdom on its slopes, 66 starred restaurants, a wine region 45 minutes out, and prices that make all of it accessible.
The crime and the power cuts are real and worth planning around. The disappointment is not. Overrated is the one thing Cape Town is not.
