Heritage Month: Curious Cape Town museums worth a visit

For most people, arriving at Groote Schuur Hospital means you’ve had a pretty bad day. But not if you’re only here to knock on the door of the Heart of Cape Town Museum. This remarkable museum, larger than you might expect, tells the story of one of Cape Town’s most extraordinary medical marvels. Here, inside Groote Schuur Hospital, Professor Christiaan Barnard’s team performed the world’s first successful human heart transplant on 3 December 1967. 

The exhibitions trace the journey from groundbreaking research to the tragedy surrounding donor Denise Darvall, and, of course, the history and enigma of the surgeon himself. It’s all set up in and around the actual operating theatres where the transplant took place: a space that has been faithfully recreated with mostly original equipment used on the night. It’s a remarkable snapshot of an incredible moment in South African history. Guided tours run Monday to Friday at 9am, 11am and 1pm, with a 3pm tour by prior booking.

Groote Schuur Hospital, Main Road, Observatory.

The Cape Town Museum of Childhood is both a gentle delight and quietly radical. It’s an interactive museum space for both children and adults that takes a curatorial eye to the lived experience of childhood. Billed as the first museum of childhood in Africa, there’ a focus on memory, oral history, research and our own interpretation of childhood. Entry is free, and the museum’s projects stretch beyond the building through outreach work, storytelling, film screenings, mobile exhibitions and education programmes across the Western Cape.

3 Milner Road, Rondebosch

Simon’s Town’s most claustrophobic museum experience is aboard SAS Assegaai, a preserved Daphné-class submarine now open to the public as a science and naval history attraction. This submarine’s story dives all the way back to 1967, when South Africa ordered three Daphné-class boats from France. This particular sub was later renamed Assegaai and retained for preservation after decommissioning. Guided tours depart every 20 to 30 minutes, with a maximum of 10 guests per group. You can expect to climb and clamber deep into the steely bowels of Africa’s only museum submarine.

King George Way, Cole Point, Simon’s Town

A short walk from the V&A Waterfront, the Cape Medical Museum is housed in the 1904 residence of the medical superintendent of the former City Hospital for Infectious Diseases. Established as a provincial museum in 1986, it looks at Cape Town through the lens of medicine, with displays on biomedical practice, indigenous medicine, nursing, pandemics and notable medical figures at the Cape. It is small, specialist and pleasingly old-school. Entry is by donation.

Old City Hospital Complex, Portswood Road, Green Point.

Since opening in July 2024, the Museum of Dogs has welcomed locals, tourists and lots of very good boys, who flock to this city-centre heritage site to pay tribute – and learn a little more – to humankind’s most loyal sidekick. The exhibitions cover dogs in all their guises, from their role in history and culture to art. But perhaps the highlights are upstairs, where more than 40 personal, heartfelt stories show how dogs shape our daily lives. Humans pay to enter. Dogs, of course, get in free.

95 Keerom Street, Cape Town

Hidden high on the Back Table, the Waterworks Museum tells the story of the ambitious engineering that put reservoirs on top of Table Mountain. By the late 1800s, Cape Town’s streams could no longer keep up with the growing city below, so engineers looked uphill: first with the Woodhead Tunnel, then with a network of mountaintop dams. The museum sits near the northern end of the Hely-Hutchinson Reservoir wall, close to the remains of the machinery used to build this unlikely waterworks. Inside are old photographs, typewritten notes and press clippings; outside, massive cogs and a steam-driven crane still hint at the labour it took to haul stone, rails and equipment onto the mountain. Access is difficult, so contact SANParks for access hours and build it into a Table Mountain hike rather than a casual drop-in visit.

Near Hely-Hutchinson Reservoir, Back Table, Table Mountain National Park.

If you’re driving down to the Deep South, you might as well make it a double-header with a visit to the South African Naval Museum. There’s more space than at the submarine museum, and the displays are much bigger too. The Rigging House includes submarine, diving and mine-countermeasure displays, with the operations room and control room of a submarine, a diving exhibit and a full-size replica bridge of a Ton-class minesweeper. Elsewhere, you’ll find naval weapons, ship’s figureheads, a Westland Wasp maritime helicopter, along with outdoor guns, radar masts and directors. The museum is open daily from 9.30am - 3.30pm, and entry is free.

St George’s Street, Simon’s Town

Is it a museum? Sort of. Is it enormous fun? Absolutely. Cape Town’s Museum of Illusions opened on Kloof Street in 2025, bringing more than 60 interactive exhibits designed to trick your eyes and scramble your sense of perspective. Expect holograms, optical illusions, stereograms and immersive rooms that play havoc with scale, balance and perception, with explanations of the science behind what your brain thinks it is seeing.

10 Kloof Street, Gardens

Set inside Air Force Base Ysterplaat, this is easily Cape Town’s most hands-on aviation-history destination. You’ll start with a wander through the Museum proper, which has plenty of exhibits and artefacts on aviation history in South Africa. But the real joy comes when you wander across the road to the hangars, where the volunteer non-profit organisation Friends of the South African Air Force Museum has a collection of aircraft in various stages of dismantling, restoration and preservation. Entry is free, though donations help maintain the museum exhibits. The Museum is open on Saturday mornings. Also look out for the occasional ground runs of the spectacular eight-propeller, four-engined Avro Shackleton MR1.

Air Force Base Ysterplaat, 587 Koeberg Road, Ysterplaat

Halfway between a scrapyard, a movie set and a petrolhead pilgrimage, Wijnland Auto Museum is home to more than 400 vehicles. But most of them aren’t going anywhere in a hurry. The collection ranges from rusty relics to post-war classics and muscle cars, with plenty of rusty patina rather than a polished, velvet-rope presentation. A highlight for many – and what makes it easy to spot from the highway – is the 50-seater Convair 580 aeroplane you can climb into, complete with cockpit access. Kids will love it.

60 Tarentaal Street, Joostenberg Vlakte

Set in the Clock Tower precinct at the V&A Waterfront, the Cape Town Diamond Museum traces the story of sparkle from geological formation to jewellery counter. Expect replicas of famous diamonds, mining gear, historical artefacts, natural kimberlite specimens and insight into how rough stones are cut, polished and turned into finished jewellery. Tours last around 30 to 45 minutes, and booking is essential.

Level 1, The Clock Tower, V&A Waterfront

Perhaps few museums in Cape Town come with quite as much historical baggage as the Rhodes Cottage Museum in Muizenberg. Cecil John Rhodes bought this modest seaside cottage in 1899 and died here, aged 48, on 26 March, 1902. Today you can peer into the bedroom where he spent his final hours, see the long table once used in the De Beers boardroom, inspect his Cape cart and discover a wonderfully old-fashioned diorama depicting his burial site in Zimbabwe’s Matobo Hills. The displays explore Rhodes’ life, mining interests and political career, although visitors should perhaps bring their own critical eye to a historical figure whose imperial ambitions profoundly shaped southern Africa.

246 Main Road, Muizenberg

Discover more: Muizenberg beyond the beach

If the Naval Museum and SAS Assegaai have already brought you to Simon’s Town, don’t miss out on the Warrior Toy Museum: a wonderfully old-school treasure trove packed with some 4000 model cars, 500 dolls and teddy bears, miniature houses, lead soldiers, Meccano, ships and two working model railways. This isn’t a slick, interactive attraction, and that’s kind of the charm: cabinets are crammed with toys and collectables accumulated over decades, while a sales section tempts anyone with a weakness for die-cast cars and model aircraft. Kids will enjoy it, and nostalgic grown-ups may just struggle to leave.

1067 King George Way, Simon’s Town

The Josephine Mill is one of those little gems of Cape Town that people drive past for years without really noticing. Set on the banks of the Liesbeek River in Newlands, it is the city’s only remaining water mill (let that sink in!) and features an original 1840s waterwheel that visitors can see and hear in action. Although the small museum has now closed to the public, you can still see this historic wheel in action every day, from 12.30pm - 1.30pm. The building is also home to the lovely La Cuccina, so why not extend your stop with an all-day breakfast or a harvest table lunch?

13 Boundary Road, Newlands

If you want to delve beyond the postcard harbour and naval history, look no further. Established in 1977, the Simon’s Town Museum collects and preserves the history of the town’s community, with exhibitions on the ‘Mountains in the Sea’, the people of Simon’s Town, forced removals, the South African War prisoner-of-war camp, Simon’s Town in the World Wars and the story of Able Seaman Just Nuisance, the Great Dane enlisted into the Royal Navy.

Note: The Museum closed in April 2026 for refurbishments, so keep an eye on social media for a reopening date.

The Residency, Court Road, Simon’s Town