Mac Rating: 0.00 | Votes: | Date:

The oldest surviving colonial building in South Africa, the Castle of Good Hope was built by the Dutch East India Company between 1666 and 1679 to defend the supply station it had established at the Cape, replacing an earlier earth-and-timber fort raised by the first commander, Jan van Riebeeck. Laid out as a five-pointed star in the manner of European fortifications of the age, with bastions named after the titles of the Prince of Orange, it once stood on the shore of Table Bay, though land reclamation has since left it well inland. Although built for war, the castle saw little fighting and served instead as the administrative and social heart of the early colony, housing the governor, offices, a church, workshops, cells and shops within its walls. Today it is a national monument and museum, home to a notable collection of paintings and decorative arts in the William Fehr Collection, a military museum and exhibits on the often harsh history of the settlement, including the slavery on which it depended. Visitors can watch a ceremonial changing of the guard and the firing of a cannon, walk the ramparts and explore the dungeons, and the castle remains in use by the military as well as being open to the public. The pentagonal plan with its projecting bastions was the standard form of military engineering in seventeenth-century Europe, designed to give defenders overlapping fields of fire, and although the castle was never seriously attacked, its survival in such complete form makes it a rare and important monument of the early colonial period. Within the walls, the layered history of the Cape is on display: the grand rooms of the governor's residence, restored and hung with the paintings and furniture of the William Fehr Collection, contrast with the cramped cells and the dungeon where prisoners were held, and exhibitions address the institution of slavery that sustained the colony and the indigenous peoples displaced by it. A bell cast in the late seventeenth century still hangs in the bell tower, said to be the oldest in the country, and the ceremonial firing of a cannon and the changing of the guard, performed in period uniform, draw visitors at set times. The castle also houses a military museum tracing the conflicts of the region. Set near the centre of modern Cape Town, with the City Hall and the Grand Parade close by, it offers a tangible link to the origins of the city and remains both a working military site and a popular destination.