The V&A Waterfront is the city's most popular shopping venue, with good reason: it has a vast range of shops, the setting on the harbour is lovely and there's a huge choice of places to eat and drink when you want to rest your feet - but expect to pay above the odds for everything. The city centre also offers variety and, for some people's taste, a grittier and more interesting venue for browsing, especially if you're looking for collectables, antiques and secondhand books. Cape Town's suburbanites tend to do their shopping closer to home at the upmarket Cavendish Square Mall in Claremont or one of the other shopping centres that include the monstrously outsized Tygerberg Mall and the pastiche-Venice Canal Walk in the northern suburbs. If you're staying in the inner-city suburbs of Green and Sea Point, adjacent to the V&A Waterfront, you'll find supermarkets and other functional shops along Main Road, and the City Bowl suburbs are served by the Gardens Shopping Centre. There are other smaller shopping areas dotted about the other suburbs.

Shopping hours have traditionally been Monday to Friday 8.30am-5pm, and Saturday till 1pm. But this has begun to change and lots of supermarkets, bookshops and other specialist outlets now open on Sundays and beyond 5pm.

Malls and shopping centres
South African shopping tends to follow an American rather than European model, with huge malls where you can browse in a bookshop as well as bank, buy clothes and groceries and go to the movies. They always have several coffee shops and...
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Arts and crafts
Cape Town is not known for its indigenous arts and crafts in the way that Durban is, and many of the goods you'll buy here are from elsewhere in Africa, especially Zimbabwe and Zambia. There are several places in the city centre and the...
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Books
South Africa produces a lot of books given the size of its reading population: you'll find scores of good locally produced novels and endless volumes on history, politics and natural history. For new books there are some pleasant places in the...
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Music
Most music is sold on CD, and the ubiquitous chains such as CNA and Musica tend to stock pretty unadventurous selections of mainly British and American sounds. For South African bands and music from the rest of the continent, the outlets...
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Food and provisions
Self-catering is the cheapest way to eat in Cape Town, and it can also be good fun. Apart from braais , which happen anywhere with any excuse, there are countless places on beaches, in the forests or up Table Mountain where you can enjoy a...
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Holistic Cape Town
Cape Town is South Africa's alternative-culture and holism capital. To find out what's on, the best publications are Link-Up , a free listings magazine, and the glossier Odyssey (R15), which is also the...
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