Where to stay in Cape Town

Gardens and Tamboerskloof are the slopes of the City Bowl — Oranjezicht and Vredehoek with them — running up from the Company's Garden towards the saddle where the cable car leaves. Guest houses in Victorian terraces, Kloof Street's restaurants along the spine, the mountain filling the window at the top of every street. It is a fifteen-minute walk down into the CBD and a five-minute drive to the cableway, which is as close to central as this city allows. What it is not is the sea, and it is not cheap.

The CBD on the flat, and Bo-Kaap climbing Signal Hill above it: the Company's Garden and the museums, Greenmarket Square, the Long and Bree Street strips, and the painted houses and mosques of the oldest surviving residential quarter in the country. It is the one part of Cape Town built to be walked, and the only one with a public link to the airport. It also empties — the CBD is an office district first, and after about seven on a weekday the streets that were crowded at lunchtime are not. Bo-Kaap is a living neighbourhood and not an exhibit: the houses are people's homes and the mosques are in use.

The old harbour turned into a precinct, and the strip of Green Point and Mouille Point behind it: the aquarium, the Robben Island boats, the Zeitz museum in the grain silo, the stadium, and a promenade that runs for kilometres along the sea. Contained, patrolled and endlessly provided for — the least like the city it sits in, which is both the criticism and the reason people choose it.

The Atlantic seaboard's working half: a three-kilometre promenade along the sea, a dense main road of restaurants and shops behind it, and apartment blocks rather than villas. It has most of what Camps Bay has except the beach and the price, and unlike the Waterfront it is a neighbourhood people live in.

The postcard: white sand under the Twelve Apostles, a single strip of restaurants facing it, sunsets that empty the city onto the beach. It is the most expensive ground in Cape Town, the most beautiful, and the most isolated — everything else is over Kloof Nek or around the coast, and there is no version of this stay without a car.

The old industrial east: Victorian terraces, warehouses turned into galleries and studios, the Saturday market at the Old Biscuit Mill, and Observatory's student bars beyond it. The cheapest ground on this list and the one that has changed fastest — parts of it are being remade around the visitors and parts of it are not, so it rewards knowing which street you are on more than any other area here. It is also next to District Six, whose emptiness is deliberate: the result of forced removals under apartheid. The area's current change is not a neutral story.