De Waterkant — Cape Town's Gay Village

De Waterkant is South Africa's original gay village: a pocket of late-1700s Georgian and Cape Dutch cottages on cobbled lanes between the city and Green Point, which in the liberated 1990s — as the new constitution became the world's first to ban discrimination by sexual orientation — filled with gay bars, clubs, guesthouses and saunas along Somerset Road. The neighbourhood's deeper history is layered and painful: once a racially mixed quarter contiguous with the Bo-Kaap, it was emptied by the Group Areas Act before its queer rebirth. Today a permanent rainbow crosswalk marks Somerset Road — the starting point of Cape Town Pride each summer — and a painted 'Pink Route' line threads the district's streets past its venues. What you see today: the scene is more dispersed than at its 2000s peak, but the crosswalk, the clubs and the guesthouse cluster keep De Waterkant the anchor of gay Cape Town — Africa's most established queer quarter, ten minutes' walk from the V&A Waterfront.