In Defence of a Cape Town Winter

Every year, round about now, Cape Town collectively decides that winter is a personal insult. The first proper cold front comes barrelling in off the Atlantic, the rain goes sideways for a bit, someone’s washing ends up in next door’s pool, and suddenly everyone I know is talking about moving to Durban or Spain. I get it, I do. The roastery in Blouberg in July is not a warm place at 6am. It’s a cold tin shed with a very loud roaster in it, and I’ve bagged more than one batch with my hands too numb to feel the scoop.

But I want to make (and convince myself of) a weird arugment: winter might be the best time of year to be in this city, and most of us are too busy complaining about it to notice.

A quick word in defence of the cold

Here’s something that foreigners fail to put on their postcards: Cape Town has a Mediterranean climate, which is a fancy way of saying our rain comes in winter, not summer. So while most of the country is going brown and crunchy (Joburg… ahem), the Cape does the opposite. The mountains turn a ridiculous, almost cartoonish green. The waterfalls that are just dry rock scars all summer start running again. Table Mountain gets that stream coming back off the front of it. And on a clear morning after a front has blown through, the light does something you don’t get any other time of year, low and sharp and gold, and the whole peninsula looks like it’s been colour-corrected by someone showing off.

The other thing, the big one, is that the crowds are gone. The city is yours again. You can get a table. You can actually park. You can walk the promenade without weaving through a thousand people. For a few months Cape Town stops being a destination and goes back to being a place where people just live, and I love it for that. A case in point: our cafe was almost like a turnstile in Jan-March this year – foreigners were coming in by the bus load – but then it died down almost overnight to a handful of regulars and locals. The difference was almost palpable.

There’s also a slower gear that winter more or less forces you into, and if you’ve read anything I’ve written before you’ll know I’m a sucker for it. I wrote a whole post about slow living a while back, and winter is basically slow living with the difficulty setting turned down. It’s hard to feel guilty about staying in and doing one thing properly when it’s bucketing down outside. The weather hands you the permission slip.

So what do you actually do with it?

Plenty, it turns out. A loose list, in no real order, of things that are better in a Cape Town winter than people give them credit for:

• Storm-watching. When a big front is on the way, go stand at Mouille Point or somewhere along the Sea Point promenade and watch the sea completely lose its mind. Take a takeaway coffee, obviously. It’s free, it’s a proper spectacle, and it’s a lot more fun than pretending you’re not a little bit into it.
• Forest walks in the rain. Somewhere like Cecilia or Newlands forest, the canopy catches most of the drizzle, everything smells incredible, and the seasonal waterfalls are actually flowing. I’m no serious hiker (I mostly plod up Lion’s Head on a Sunday and call it exercise), but even I can manage a wet forest.
• The clear-day ambush. Watch the forecast, and the moment a still, blue day lands between fronts, drop everything and get up a mountain. Winter mornings are dead calm, none of the summer Southeaster trying to peel you off the ridge, and the views on those days are the best you’ll get all year. Table Mountain National Park has more paths than most of us ever bother to try.
• Whales. They start showing up around now, working their way along False Bay and out towards Hermanus over the coming months. You don’t need a boat. A good pair of eyes and a bench will do it.
• Being indoors on purpose. The Labia for a cheap afternoon film, a secondhand bookshop you lose an hour in, a wine farm out in Constantia with an actual fireplace fifteen minutes from town. Or, and I’m obviously biased, an hour at a cafe with a proper flat white and no particular plan.

The mistake we make, I think, is treating winter as a thing to be survived, a grey holding pattern until the beach reopens. But you get four of these months every single year. That’s about a third of your life in this city spent apologising for the season instead of using it. And the version that’s actually on the table, green mountains, empty trails, whales, storms, and every excuse in the world to slow down and stay warm, is a lot lovelier than we give it credit for.

So this year I’m going to try not to moan about it. (Ask me again in late August, when the third straight week of rain has set in and I’ve completely forgotten I wrote this.) For now though: put the kettle on, watch the weather roll in over the bay, and let winter do the one thing it’s best at, which is slowing you right down. 🙂

If a grey morning has you reaching for something warm, our coffee is roasted to order over on the blends and single origin pages, and if you’d rather just come sit the weather out with us, here’s where to find the cafe. Either way, come say hi on Instagram and show me how you’re spending your winter, storm-watching, forest-walking, or firmly refusing to leave the couch. All valid.