Camps Bay

Camps Bay is on the Atlantic side of the Cape Peninsula, ten minutes from central Cape Town over Kloof Nek. The beach is about a kilometre of white sand with the Twelve Apostles — the western face of the Table Mountain range — standing directly behind it.

The setting does the work. Few city beaches anywhere have a thousand-metre mountain wall immediately behind them, and the combination of that, white sand and the Atlantic is why Camps Bay appears in every photograph of Cape Town that is not of the mountain itself. The strip of restaurants and bars along the front is the city's most visible outdoor room.

The water is the catch. This is the Atlantic side, where the Benguela Current brings cold water up from the south, and the sea here sits around 12 to 15°C in summer — cold enough that swimming is a brief and shrieking business. The bay is also exposed to the south-easter, the wind that blows hard across Cape Town through summer and which can make the beach unusable on an otherwise perfect day. Rip currents are present and lifeguards patrol in season.

Development is a suburb: restaurants and hotels along Victoria Road, apartments on the slope, and tidal pools at either end that are warmer and calmer than the sea. Clifton's four coves, a few minutes north, are sheltered from the south-easter and are where Capetonians go when it blows; Llandudno beyond them is smaller and harder to park at, which is why it stays quiet.

Twelve to fifteen degrees, and almost nobody stays in. Camps Bay is a setting rather than a swimming beach — a thousand-metre mountain wall directly behind white sand — and the south-easter can end the afternoon without warning. Cross the peninsula to False Bay if you actually want to swim.