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Cape Town has grown as a city in a way that few others in the world have. Take a good look at the street names. Strand and Waterkant streets (meaning "beach" and "waterside," respectively) are now far from the sea. However, when they were named, they were right on the beach. An enormous program of dumping rubble into the ocean extended the city by a good few square miles (thanks to the Dutch obsession with reclaiming land from the sea). Almost all the city on the seaward side of Strand and Waterkant is part of the reclaimed area of the city known as the Foreshore. If you look at old paintings of the city, you will see that originally waves lapped at the very walls of the castle, now more than half a mile from the ocean.
This may be the world's most stunningly located public swimming pool; the main pool is Olympic-sized and a second, smaller pool has springboards for diving, and there are two splash pools for children. Surrounded by views of Lion's Head and the Atlantic Ocean, the only downsides to this amazing seawater-filled pool are that it's not heated and can get extremely busy during school holidays and on hot summer days.
