What To Do In Long Street, The Company Gardens
Just a short walk from The Long Street Hotel in Cape Town you'll find the Company Gardens, an eight-hectare oasis in the heart of the bustling city. The tree-lined central avenue with its benches at regular intervals and crafters selling their wares is a favourite place for both locals and visitors to enjoy a leisurely stroll, while the expansive lush lawns make a perfect venue for a long slow summer picnic or a romantic rendezvous.
Just a short walk from Long Street Hotel you can enter the gardens and buy peanuts to feed the many friendly squirrels, which are descendants of those introduced to the Gardens by Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of the Cape Province in the late nineteenth century. A statue of Rhodes presides over the central path, showing him pointing northwards and referencing his dream of extending the British Empire all the way through Africa from the Cape to Cairo.
The origin of the Company Gardens dates back to 1647 when the shipwrecked crew of a Dutch ship, the Haarlem, sowed vegetable seeds near a stream of fresh water running down from Table Mountain. Six months later, they were rescued and taken home to Holland where their reports of the fertile land and congenial growing conditions convinced the Dutch East India Company to establish a permanent supply station in what is now Cape Town, for trading ships on their way to the East.
Under the leadership of Jan van Riebeeck, master gardener Hendrik Boom started what would become the Company Gardens in April 1652, planting a Saffraan Pear which can still be seen here today, the oldest cultivated tree in South Africa. Over the next ten years, Boom established a flourishing vegetable and fruit garden, as well as a section with herbs and medicinal plants, and then added ornamental plants. The first rose was reported to have bloomed Cape Town in November 1659.
Successive governors and gardeners added their own touches, gradually transforming the food garden into a world-famous botanical garden which propagated and exported African plants to Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. The old Governor's residence, Tuynhuis, now the South African President's Cape Town residence, is situated about halfway along the avenue. The oak-wooded open area above where the National Art Gallery is today was originally used as paddocks for indigenous wildlife, including zebra and various types of antelope, and in Victorian times there was a menagerie there. Lions were kept in the grounds of what is now Cape Town High School, bordering on the Gardens, and the gates for their enclosure can still be seen on either side of the upper end of the avenue.
Other places of interest in the Gardens include the South African National Gallery and the Museum, outside of which the Delville Wood Monument honours South Africans who died in the three-day battle of the Somme in 1916. At the lower end of the avenue, you can see an old well that used to provide most of Cape Town's water; the pump, engraved with the maker's name and the date 1842, has been engulfed by an oak tree and now juts out of the trunk two metres above the ground. There's a well-stocked fish pond, a rose garden dating from 1929, an aviary, fountains and statues, and a delightful tea-room.
Just a short walk from Long Street Hotel you can enter the gardens and buy peanuts to feed the many friendly squirrels, which are descendants of those introduced to the Gardens by Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of the Cape Province in the late nineteenth century. A statue of Rhodes presides over the central path, showing him pointing northwards and referencing his dream of extending the British Empire all the way through Africa from the Cape to Cairo.
The origin of the Company Gardens dates back to 1647 when the shipwrecked crew of a Dutch ship, the Haarlem, sowed vegetable seeds near a stream of fresh water running down from Table Mountain. Six months later, they were rescued and taken home to Holland where their reports of the fertile land and congenial growing conditions convinced the Dutch East India Company to establish a permanent supply station in what is now Cape Town, for trading ships on their way to the East.
Under the leadership of Jan van Riebeeck, master gardener Hendrik Boom started what would become the Company Gardens in April 1652, planting a Saffraan Pear which can still be seen here today, the oldest cultivated tree in South Africa. Over the next ten years, Boom established a flourishing vegetable and fruit garden, as well as a section with herbs and medicinal plants, and then added ornamental plants. The first rose was reported to have bloomed Cape Town in November 1659.
Successive governors and gardeners added their own touches, gradually transforming the food garden into a world-famous botanical garden which propagated and exported African plants to Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. The old Governor's residence, Tuynhuis, now the South African President's Cape Town residence, is situated about halfway along the avenue. The oak-wooded open area above where the National Art Gallery is today was originally used as paddocks for indigenous wildlife, including zebra and various types of antelope, and in Victorian times there was a menagerie there. Lions were kept in the grounds of what is now Cape Town High School, bordering on the Gardens, and the gates for their enclosure can still be seen on either side of the upper end of the avenue.
Other places of interest in the Gardens include the South African National Gallery and the Museum, outside of which the Delville Wood Monument honours South Africans who died in the three-day battle of the Somme in 1916. At the lower end of the avenue, you can see an old well that used to provide most of Cape Town's water; the pump, engraved with the maker's name and the date 1842, has been engulfed by an oak tree and now juts out of the trunk two metres above the ground. There's a well-stocked fish pond, a rose garden dating from 1929, an aviary, fountains and statues, and a delightful tea-room.
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