South Africa: Muizenberg’s Beach Huts – A Rainbow on the Shore

🌈 South Africa: Muizenberg’s Beach Huts – A Rainbow on the Shore

Right, so there we were, shuffling along this stretch of the Western Cape coastline, and I have to say, nothing quite prepares you for that first proper sighting of the Muizenberg beach huts. These aren’t just any old beach huts, mind you — they’re the kind of thing you’ve seen in a hundred Instagram posts and magazine spreads, but seeing them in the flesh is something else entirely. Each one is painted in its own bold, uncompromising block of primary colour — vivid reds, blues, yellows, greens — all trimmed in crisp white, standing shoulder to shoulder in a neat row against the backdrop of the rolling surf of False Bay and the magnificent Hottentots Holland mountains rising up beyond. The whole scene looks almost too cheerful to be entirely real, like someone’s tipped a box of enormous Lego bricks onto the sand. This small but rather charming seaside town sits roughly thirty minutes south of the Cape Town city centre, making it an easy half-day excursion, and it’s earned itself a solid reputation as the birthplace of surfing culture in South Africa — though more on that in a moment. The huts themselves provide a surprisingly useful windbreak during the height of the southern hemisphere summer, which runs from roughly December through February, when the south-easter wind — locally known as the Cape Doctor for its ability to blow away the smog and heat — comes screaming in off the ocean and makes life rather uncomfortable for anyone trying to sit quietly on the beach with a sandwich and a good book.

We’d had a magnificent day out at the Cape of Good Hope, which sits at the south-western tip of the Cape Peninsula and is about as dramatic a piece of coastline as you’ll find anywhere on the planet. The Cape of Good Hope was first rounded by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias back in 1488 — he actually called it the Cape of Storms, which seems rather more honest given the weather — and it was Vasco da Gama who later completed the full route to India in 1497, opening up the sea trading route that would shape world history for the next several centuries. After all of that considerable historical weight, we decided to take the scenic route back up to Cape Town, swinging round the eastern side of the peninsula along the False Bay coast rather than heading straight back the way we’d come up the Atlantic seaboard. It turned out to be one of those decisions that you congratulate yourself on for the rest of the trip. The road hugs the coastline beautifully, offering views across False Bay towards the Hottentots Holland mountains on the far shore, and there are several tempting places to stop along the way — Simon’s Town with its famous penguin colony at Boulders Beach being the most obvious, though we’d already ticked that one off earlier in our Cape Town stay.

🏘️ Muizenberg — Dutch for “Mice Mountain” — Is a Beach-Side Town in the Western Cape

There was one place in particular I had been keen to track down, and that was the seaside town of Muizenberg, whose rather modest Dutch name — Muizenberg, meaning “mice mountain,” which I think we can all agree is not the most inspiring of geographical labels — rather undersells what turns out to be a genuinely lovely spot. The name is thought to refer to a small hill in the area where, during the colonial period, the landscape was said to be overrun with mice, which is possibly the least glamorous origin story for a place-name in the entire Western Cape. The town is set at the point where the Cape Peninsula curves around to the east along the False Bay coastline, and its history is considerably richer than its mousy name suggests. Muizenberg was the site of the Battle of Muizenberg in September 1795, when British forces defeated the Dutch Batavian Republic here and took control of the Cape Colony — a significant moment in the colonial history of southern Africa that set the stage for British dominance in the region for the next century and a half. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the town had become one of Cape Town’s most fashionable seaside resorts, attracting wealthy Capetonians and their families who came to bathe in the calmer, warmer waters of False Bay rather than the icy Atlantic rollers on the other side of the peninsula. Cecil John Rhodes — the rather divisive British colonial magnate who gave his name to Rhodesia — owned a cottage here called Rust en Vrede, and it was in Muizenberg that he died in March 1902, though his remains were later transported north to be buried in the Matobo Hills in what is now Zimbabwe. Today, the town is firmly established as the main surfing spot in Cape Town and is home to a vibrant surfing community centred on the popular Surfer’s Corner — a stretch of beach that attracts learners and more experienced surfers alike thanks to the long, gentle, consistent waves rolling in off False Bay, which are considered just about ideal for anyone wanting to get to grips with a board without being immediately flattened by a ten-foot Atlantic wall of water. It was not surfing that had drawn me here, however — I am reliably several decades too old and considerably too inflexible for that sort of carry-on — but the gloriously colourful beach huts that I had seen plastered across Instagram and half a dozen travel blogs, and which had lodged themselves firmly in my mind as something I really needed to see in person. We do like a nice beach hut.

There are, as it turns out, two distinct rows of beach huts strung along the Muizenberg shoreline, and each sits in a slightly different position relative to the beach’s main landmarks. The first row stands directly opposite the children’s playpark at Surfer’s Corner itself, making for a rather festive juxtaposition of primary-coloured huts and the general controlled chaos of small people on the beach. The second row is positioned a little further along, closer to the elevated walkway that runs adjacent to the Putt-Putt course — yes, there is indeed a Putt-Putt course, because no traditional seaside resort in the southern hemisphere is apparently complete without one. The huts themselves have a long and rather interesting history. Originally constructed in the Edwardian era — most historians date the earliest structures to the period between roughly 1904 and 1914, when Muizenberg was at the absolute height of its fashionable popularity as a bathing resort — they were built as private changing rooms, or bathing boxes, for the genteel middle and upper classes of Cape Town who came down to take the sea air and have a thoroughly respectable paddle without the indignity of being seen changing on a public beach. The concept of the bathing box was enormously popular across the British Empire during this period, and versions of the same idea could be found at seaside resorts from Brighton to Bombay. Each hut was privately owned and fiercely guarded by its family, who would return to the same spot season after season in a tradition that continued for generations. The soft, wide white sands immediately behind the huts provide a natural windbreak during the height of summer, sheltering bathers from the worst of the Cape Doctor’s attentions, and this stretch of beach is staffed by lifeguards during the season, forming part of the Blue Flag-accredited section of Muizenberg beach. The Blue Flag certification, awarded by the Foundation for Environmental Education, is one of the world’s most recognised voluntary eco-labels for beaches and marinas, recognising high standards of water quality, environmental management, safety and services — so it is not given out lightly, and it is a genuine badge of honour for any beach that earns it. In former years, the sheltered section behind the beach boxes apparently became so enormously popular that it acquired its own rather colourful unofficial name: locals called it the “snake pit,” on account of the dense, wriggling mass of humanity packed into the space on a busy summer’s day. Whether that nickname should be taken as a recommendation or a warning is perhaps a matter of personal temperament.

😔 Sadly, Several of the Beach Huts Are in Disrepair and There Has Been Talk of Tearing Them Down

It wasn’t all sunshine and primary colours, however — and I say that both literally and figuratively, as we shall get to the weather situation in a moment. The rather sobering reality is that a significant number of the Muizenberg beach huts have been allowed to fall into a state of considerable disrepair over the past few decades, and at some point the local municipality apparently entertained the genuinely catastrophic idea of simply demolishing the lot and being done with it. As you might imagine, this proposal was met with the kind of volcanic public response that suggests someone in an office somewhere had catastrophically misjudged how much Cape Town residents — and indeed the wider South African public — care about these particular structures. The resulting outcry was swift, passionate and impressively sustained, and it eventually gave rise to a well-organised local movement dedicated to getting the huts properly assessed, preserved and renovated to something approaching their former glory. Yeah! Good on them, frankly. These things are part of the cultural and architectural heritage of the Western Cape, and losing them to administrative indifference would be a genuine tragedy. We arrived at Muizenberg as the sun was beginning its descent towards the horizon, which meant the light conditions were not absolutely perfect for photography — the golden hour had not quite arrived, and the light had that slightly flat, in-between quality that photographers find maddening and the rest of us simply accept as the price of being somewhere beautiful at the slightly wrong time of day. What the light lacked in drama, however, the wind more than compensated for in spectacle. There was a proper, lusty Cape Doctor blowing in across False Bay that afternoon, and it had attracted a remarkable number of parachute windsurfers — kitesurfers, if you want to be technically accurate about it — who were out in force along the Muizenberg beachfront with their gloriously coloured, billowing kite-shaped parachutes filling the sky above the surf. Against the backdrop of the bright beach huts, the vivid kites, the white surf and the distant mountains, it made for a genuinely spectacular sight that I suspect no photograph could really do full justice to. Some things you just have to be there for.