The Southern-Summer Issue

While the north shivers, Cape Town is in the middle of its summer, and February is the city at its best — long, dry, warm days under Table Mountain, and a standing reminder that the travel calendar has two halves. It is also several places at once: a working port city, a string of beach suburbs along the Atlantic, and a serious wine country half an hour inland.

The mountain sets the terms. It rises straight out of the middle of the city, its flat top often smoking with the cloud they call the tablecloth, and the wind that comes with it — the Cape Doctor, a hard south-easter — can decide which beach is bearable on a given day. Camps Bay, on the Atlantic side, is the glamorous sundowner strip; the City Bowl beneath the mountain puts you among the restaurants and the history; and the old estates of Constantia trade the city for oak-shaded vineyards inside the city limits.

Where you base decides which of those cities you get, and the advice is not to try to hold all of them at once. Give the urban half of the trip to a beach or the bowl, and the other half to the vineyards, because the Winelands are the thing people wish they had allowed more time for.

Less than an hour inland, Stellenbosch and Franschhoek are among the loveliest wine towns anywhere — gabled Cape Dutch farmhouses, oak avenues, and estate restaurants that lay on long lunches among the vines that outshine most of what the city can offer. Stay a night rather than driving back, and let the day run late.

Vivienne Hartwell, Editor-in-Chief