The 10 Best City Experiences in Africa

Every wall, staircase and doorway in this Rif Mountains town is washed in shades of blue, a tradition with disputed origins that's turned the entire medina into one continuous wash of colour.

Cats doze in doorways and potted plants spill over blue-painted steps, with barely a corner that doesn't reward a second look.

Founded as a 15th-century fortress town, its alleys were never built for cars.

Table Mountain's flat-topped silhouette looms directly over the city bowl, often capped by a rolling cloud locals call the tablecloth.

A cable car reaches the summit in minutes, but the classic view is looking back at the mountain from Bloubergstrand or Signal Hill, with the city spread out beneath it.

Penguins waddle across a public beach at Boulders just outside the city.

Marrakech's main square transforms completely between day and night: by afternoon it's snake charmers, henna artists and orange juice stalls, and by dusk it becomes one of the world's great open-air food markets, dozens of numbered stalls filling the square with smoke, spice and the calls of vendors.

UNESCO declared it a Masterpiece of Oral Heritage.

Table Mountain's flat-topped summit, draped in its famous tablecloth of cloud, presides over Cape Town and offers 360-degree panoramas stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to the Winelands.

The mountain is home to an extraordinary number of endemic plant species found nowhere else on earth.

Morocco's most visited city layers a maze-like medina of souks, riads and palaces against the backdrop of the snow-capped Atlas Mountains.

Beyond Djemaa el-Fna's nightly spectacle, the city holds the tiled Bahia Palace, the cactus-filled Majorelle Garden, and endless alleys of dyers, leatherworkers and spice sellers.

Getting deliberately lost in the medina, then finding a rooftop café to reorient, is as much the experience as any single sight.

Billed as 'Africa's Grandest Gathering', Cape Town's jazz festival fills the Cape Town International Convention Centre with five stages over two nights, mixing South African jazz greats with international headliners.

A free open-air concert the day before opens the festival to the wider public, and the indoor programme's overlapping sets encourage wandering between stages rather than committing to one act all night.

Egypt's sprawling capital is an overwhelming mix of ancient and modern — the Egyptian Museum's trove of pharaonic artifacts (including much of Tutankhamun's treasure), the medieval alleys and mosques of Islamic Cairo, and the chaotic bargaining of Khan el-Khalili bazaar, all set against relentless traffic and one of the world's largest urban populations.

The density of history alongside the Giza Pyramids nearby makes it hard to skip.

A white-sand beach a ten-minute drive from central Cape Town, backed by the granite spine of the Twelve Apostles and lined with a busy strip of palm-fringed restaurants and bars.

The water is bracingly cold thanks to the Atlantic's Benguela current, so most visitors come for the setting, the sunset and the promenade scene rather than long swims.

Few city beaches anywhere have a backdrop like it.

A distinctly German-colonial coastal town where half-timbered buildings sit oddly against Atlantic surf and encroaching Namib dunes, Swakopmund has become Namibia's adventure-sports hub.

Sandboarding and quad-biking on the dunes at the town's edge, alongside skydiving and dolphin cruises, give it a livelier, more activity-driven scene than its quiet colonial streets suggest.

It's also the natural staging point for trips to the Skeleton Coast.

Namibia's compact capital mixes German-colonial architecture — a hilltop Lutheran church and a namesake fortress — with a modern African city center, serving most visitors mainly as the practical start and end point for a wider safari or desert road trip.

Christuskirche and the Independence Memorial Museum offer a few hours of genuine sightseeing, while the Namibia Craft Centre gathers work from artisans across the country in one stop.