Castle of Good Hope: VOC Fortification and Cape Town’s Maritime Replenishment Station

Walk a few blocks east from the Grand Parade in central Cape Town and the street grid gives way to a low, five-pointed fortress of ochre walls and angled bastions. The Castle of Good Hope is the oldest surviving colonial building in South Africa, laid out by the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) between 1666 and 1679 to guard a station whose real business was not war but supply: fresh water, meat and vegetables for the fleets sailing between the Netherlands and Asia. Its five bastions once stood at the edge of Table Bay; reclaimed land now puts the sea out of sight. On the third day of our Southern Africa Tour, the castle is the first major stop of a full day in the city, and it is the best place to begin understanding how Cape Town came to exist at all.

A replenishment station that needed a fort

The Dutch did not come to the Cape to found a colony. In April 1652 Jan van Riebeeck landed on the shore of Table Bay with orders to set up a refreshment post for VOC ships: a garden, a supply of fresh water, livestock bought from the local Khoikhoi herders, and a hospital for sailors sick with scurvy after months at sea. The voyage between the Dutch Republic and Batavia (now Jakarta) took the better part of a year, and a reliable halfway stop could decide whether a crew arrived fit to work or not at all.

Van Riebeeck began building a fort within days of landing. The Fort de Goede Hoop was a square of earth and timber with a pointed bastion at each corner, named after the ships of his small fleet: Drommedaris, Walvisch, Oliphant and Reijger. A nearby stream was diverted to fill its moat. Earth walls suited a station built in a hurry, but they slumped in the Cape’s winter rains and needed constant repair. Its site lay on the shore near today’s Grand Parade, a short walk from the castle that replaced it.

By the early 1660s the case for something stronger had become hard to ignore. The Netherlands and England were drifting towards the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and a station that fed the Company’s Asian fleets was a tempting prize. In 1664 the visiting commissioner Isbrand Goske instructed Zacharias Wagenaer, Van Riebeeck’s successor as commander, to build a stone fortress. For the wider story of the centuries before and after this moment, our history of South Africa for travellers sets the castle in its longer context.

Building the Castle of Good Hope, 1666 to 1679

The four corner stones were laid on 2 January 1666, by Wagenaer and three senior Company officials. The plan was a pentagon, the five-pointed star fort that military engineers across Europe had refined over the previous century. Each corner carried an angled bastion, so that defenders on one could fire along the face of the wall to its neighbour, leaving no blind ground at the foot of the walls. A moat surrounded the whole.

Progress was slow. The VOC was a commercial company answerable to its shareholders, and it was reluctant to spend more on stone at the Cape than it had to. Work stopped and started for thirteen years. The old earth fort was ordered demolished in 1674 as the new walls became usable, and on 26 April 1679 the castle was complete. That day its five bastions received the names they still carry, taken from the titles of William III, Prince of Orange: Leerdam, Buuren, Katzenellenbogen, Nassau and Oranje.

Almost everything came from close at hand. Most of the stone was quarried on Signal Hill above the town. Blue slate was shipped across from Robben Island, and so were the seashells burned to make lime; the mortar was one part shell lime to one part clay. Timber came from Hout Bay and from overseas. Only specialised materials such as the small yellow and red ballast bricks called klompjes travelled out from Europe, in the holds of ships that needed weight on the outward voyage.

The labour was not free. The walls were raised by soldiers and sailors, by volunteers, by Khoikhoi prisoners serving sentences, and by enslaved people the Company had brought to the Cape from Madagascar, Mozambique, India and the Indonesian archipelago. The Khoikhoi had their own name for the finished building, Kui keip, the stone kraal: a herders’ word for an enclosure, applied to the strangest one they had ever seen.

Reading the walls: gate, bell tower and the Kat

The castle’s first entrance faced the sea. Between 1682 and 1684, under Commander Simon van der Stel, it was moved to its present position between the Leerdam and Buuren bastions, and the gateway that visitors pass through today was built. A triangular outwork called a ravelin, added in 1697, forces anyone approaching to turn sharply before reaching the gate, so an attacker could never charge or fire straight at it.

Look up at the pediment above the gate. A crowned lion holds seven arrows, one for each of the seven provinces of the United Netherlands, and beneath it sit the arms of the six chambers that made up the VOC: Amsterdam, Middelburg, Delft, Rotterdam, Hoorn and Enkhuizen, flanked by the Company’s monogram. It is a statement of ownership as much as decoration, and a reminder that the castle belonged to a company rather than a state. For a long time the gateway’s ornamental stone was assumed to have been carved in the Netherlands and shipped out; geological study has since shown it to be Robben Island slate, worked at the Cape.

Above the gate rises an octagonal bell tower of klompjes, finished in 1684. Its bell was cast in Amsterdam in 1697, weighs just over 300 kilograms and is the oldest bell in South Africa. It rang the hours, warned of danger and called soldiers and townspeople together, and it could be heard about ten kilometres away.

Inside, a massive cross-wall divides the castle into an outer and an inner court. The Dutch called a wall of this kind a kat. Commissioner Hendrik van Rheede tot Drakenstein recommended it in 1685, and it was built of Robben Island slate, roughly 12 metres high and 116 metres long. Set into it is the castle’s finest piece of architecture, the Kat Balcony, from which proclamations were read to soldiers, burghers and enslaved people gathered in the courtyard below. The first balcony dates to 1695. Its present Baroque form was built between 1786 and 1790 to a design by the architect Louis Michel Thibault, with sculpture and reliefs by Anton Anreith, the leading sculptor at the Cape in the late eighteenth century.

Why is the Castle of Good Hope painted yellow?

The yellow was a practical choice. The castle’s own account is that the colour was chosen to reduce the glare and heat of the Cape sun on the walls. The British later altered the look of the place, raising some walls with reddish brick and whitewashing interiors in the 1830s, and the restoration that ended in 1993 returned much of the castle to its earlier ochre. The yellow walls are now so closely tied to the building that the castle’s recent maintenance programme bought yellow paint for the interior.

Life inside a company town

For more than a century the castle was not just a garrison but the working centre of the Cape. From 1678 it held the civilian, administrative and military life of the settlement. The Governor’s quarters contained the Grand Hall, where the Council of Policy met to run the colony. Around the courtyards stood a church, a bakery, workshops, stores, living quarters for soldiers and officials, and prison cells. Simon van der Stel created a circular pool in the inner court around 1690, and his son Willem Adriaan enlarged it and built a bakery beside it in 1705. That Dolphin Pool was filled in during the 1860s, uncovered again in 1981 and restored during the 1980s.

Not all of it was gracious. Beneath one of the walls lies the Donker Gat, the Dark Hole, built to store gunpowder and ammunition and so damp that it ended up holding coal. Next to it is a chamber where, under Dutch law of the period, prisoners were questioned under torture. Visitors who walk through the castle’s rooms in sequence meet the hall of government and the cells within a few minutes of each other, which is itself part of the lesson.

The station worked. When the French writer François-Timoléon de Choisy stopped at the Cape in June 1685 on his way to Siam, he admired the fort’s gardens and noted that more than 25 Company ships called each year for provisions. As the settlement grew, so did its farms. In 1685 Van der Stel received a grant of land behind Table Mountain and named it Constantia, the estate that grew into the vineyards the tour visits on Day 2. Our article on the Constantia wine route follows that story from the governor’s farm to the modern estates.

Why is the Castle of Good Hope inland if it was built on the shore?

Because the shore moved, not the castle. When it was built, the walls stood on the coastline of Table Bay, where they could command the anchorage. Land reclamation in the twentieth century pushed the waterline out into the bay and created the Foreshore, the district between the castle and today’s harbour. The castle now sits a short distance inland on the edge of the city centre, but its position still marks where the old shoreline ran.

Krotoa and the people inside the story

The castle tells the history of the people who built and governed it most loudly, but it is not the only history it holds. The Khoikhoi communities of the Cape Peninsula traded cattle with the newcomers from the first weeks of the settlement, and fought them when access to grazing land was taken away. Their lives shaped the station from the beginning.

One woman stands out. Krotoa, known to the Dutch as Eva, joined Van Riebeeck’s household as a girl of about ten, learned Dutch, and became the main interpreter between the Company and the Khoikhoi. She is credited with helping negotiate the terms that ended the first Khoikhoi-Dutch war. After her baptism she married the Danish surgeon Pieter van Meerhof, the first recorded marriage of its kind at the Cape. When he was killed on an expedition to Madagascar her standing collapsed: she was banished to Robben Island, and her children were taken from her. In August 2016 a memorial to Krotoa was unveiled at the castle in a ceremony that symbolically returned her spirit there, and it stands today beside the chapel.

Many of the people who built and served the castle were enslaved, and the long story of slavery at the Cape is told more fully at the Slave Lodge a few blocks away, which also served for a time as the seat of government. The castle’s Cape Heritage displays and the Krotoa memorial now set these histories alongside the military and official story, which earlier presentations largely left out.

British rule, prison cells and a military headquarters

The castle never fired a shot in its own defence. In 1795 the British took the Cape after the Battle of Muizenberg, and the castle passed into their hands without a siege. The Cape was returned to the Dutch, as the Batavian Republic, in 1803, then taken again after the Battle of Blaauwberg in 1806, this time for good. Lady Anne Barnard, whose letters and sketches are among the liveliest records of the early British Cape, lived briefly at the castle, and a function room there is named after her.

Under British rule the castle became more barracks and prison than seat of government, which moved elsewhere in the town. In 1879, after the Anglo-Zulu War, the Zulu king Cetshwayo was held prisoner here. During the South African War of 1899 to 1902 part of the castle was again used as a prison, and the cells survive. One of their best-known inmates, Fritz Joubert Duquesne, came close to escaping by digging through a wall. The castle passed to the South African government in 1922 and served for many years as the regional headquarters of the army in the Western Cape. It is still home to a working regiment, the Cape Town Highlanders.

Restoration and the castle today

In 1936 the castle became the first site in South Africa to be declared a historical monument. A long restoration from the mid-1970s to 1993 rebuilt the bakery and the Dolphin Pool, re-dug the moat and reconnected it to its original water source, returned the Kat Balcony to its 1780s appearance and the Military Museum to the 1870s. The aim was not to freeze the castle at one moment but to let several periods of its history show at once. The result is regarded as the best-preserved VOC fort anywhere.

Inside today are the William Fehr Collection of paintings, furniture and decorative arts from the colonial Cape, managed by Iziko Museums of South Africa and displayed in the former Governor’s rooms; the Castle Military Museum; FIRED, a permanent ceramics exhibition in the old granary; and the Krotoa memorial. In 2025 the Castle Control Board began a programme of maintenance and repair, including roof waterproofing, repainting, garden clearance and a repair to the wall beside the Kat Balcony, while keeping the castle open to visitors.

What happens at the Key Ceremony, and will we see it?

The Key Ceremony is a re-enactment of the castle’s morning routine, held on weekdays at 10 am. Uniformed members of the Castle Guard march to the entrance and ceremonially unlock it, much as the garrison would have opened the gates at the start of a day three centuries ago. Separately, a small signal cannon, once used to announce ships sighted at sea, is fired in the outer court. Both events depend on the weather, and the cannon is not fired on Sundays. Whether the group arrives in time to see the ceremony depends on the day’s schedule, and your Tour Leader will tell you on the morning.

How much walking does a visit to the Castle of Good Hope involve?

A moderate amount, mostly at an easy pace. The castle describes itself as wheelchair friendly, and most of what you see lies around its two courtyards and the rooms opening off them, so the distances are short. The castle recommends sturdy, comfortable shoes. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2 (Moderate), which means being able to manage three to five hours of activity a day and walking of up to eight kilometres on uneven ground; the Cape Town city day, with Table Mountain and the Company’s Garden to follow, is a full one.

The castle on the Cape Town leg of the route

The Castle of Good Hope makes most sense as one piece of a larger maritime landscape, and the tour’s first three days in Cape Town are built around it. On Day 2 the group heads south to Cape Point and the Good Hope Nature Reserve, where the headland that sailors feared and the shipwrecks along its coast show exactly why a safe anchorage and a supply station mattered so much. That afternoon brings the Constantia valley, where the farms that fed the station grew into wine estates.

Day 3 begins in the city itself. The drive into the centre passes the statues of Bartolomeu Dias and Jan van Riebeeck before the visit to the castle. After it, the cable car rises to the top of Table Mountain (Signal Hill if the weather closes in), followed by the Company’s Garden, laid out as the station’s vegetable garden and now a public park and botanical garden, and a drive through the Bo-Kaap. Seen together, the castle, the garden and the mountain above them tell a single story of a station built to feed ships, which became a city.

From Cape Town the route turns east along the Garden Route and north to Johannesburg, Kruger, Victoria Falls and Chobe. Our overview of the Southern Africa cultural tour route shows how the Cape’s maritime beginnings connect to the farming country of the Klein Karoo, the mining city of Johannesburg and the rivers and parks of the interior. For a broader introduction to the region, see our guide to exploring Southern Africa.

Few buildings in the country carry as many layers as this one: company fort, seat of government, prison, barracks, museum and memorial. Standing in the courtyard under the Kat Balcony, it is easy to picture the proclamations read from it, and harder, but more rewarding, to picture everyone who stood below listening. That is a good frame of mind in which to begin a journey through Southern Africa.