Qualla: Castle of Good Hope

Castle of Good Hope: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Armineaghayan, CC BY-SA 4.0. A French traveller named Francois-Timoleon de Choisy stopped at the Castle of Good Hope in June 1685, on his way to Siam, and wrote that the fortress was "very attractive" - its houses so clean and white "that you know they are Dutch." He marvelled at a garden he wished could be transplanted to Versailles, with walks of orange and lemon trees stretching as far as the eye could see. What de Choisy did not mention, or chose not to, was that the fortress had been built in part by enslaved people - up to 60,000 brought from Madagascar, Mozambique, the Dutch East Indies, and India. The Castle of Good Hope is the oldest colonial building in South Africa, a pentagon of stone that tells two stories at once: one of elegant Dutch engineering and another of the brutal labor system that made it possible.

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Image: Armineaghayan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castle of Good Hope: Walls Against an Empire

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Darren Glanville from Acle, Norfolk, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. The castle exists because of fear. In 1664, tensions between Great Britain and the Netherlands were rising, and Commander Zacharias Wagenaer - successor to Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape - received orders to build a stone fortress. The first stone was laid on 2 January 1666, but th...

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Image: Darren Glanville from Acle, Norfolk, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Castle of Good Hope: A Fort Adrift from the Sea

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philipp Schäufele - User: (WT-shared) Flip666 at wts wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 1.0. When the castle was completed, its walls rose directly from the shoreline of Table Bay. Ships anchored within sight of its guns, and the pentagonal fortress commanded the approaches to the tiny Dutch settlement. Today, the castle sits hundreds of meters inland, stranded by two ce...

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Image: Philipp Schäufele - User: (WT-shared) Flip666 at wts wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 1.0

Castle of Good Hope: The Spy Who Dug with a Spoon

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0. During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), part of the castle served as a prison. Among its inmates was Fritz Joubert Duquesne, a Boer soldier who would go on to become one of the most remarkable spies of the twentieth century - later known as the man who claimed to have killed Lord...

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Image: Bernard Gagnon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castle of Good Hope: Six Flags Over the Cape

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lars H. Rohwedder (User:RokerHRO), CC BY-SA 3.0. The castle courtyard displays six flags that have flown over the Cape in chronological order: the Dutch Prince's Flag, the flag of Great Britain, the Batavian flag, the flag of the United Kingdom, the old South African flag, and the current South African flag. Each represents a t...

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Image: Lars H. Rohwedder (User:RokerHRO) | CC BY-SA 3.0