A famous Cape Town spot for photographers and Instagrammers is Bo-Kaap, a multicultural neighborhood known for its brightly painted houses and cobblestone streets:
Once known as the Malay Quarter, this is the heart of Cape Town's Muslim population. The first slaves in the Cape Town region were not from South Africa but rather from Malaysia, Indonesia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and other parts of Africa, and they leased homes/apartments in this neighborhood. At that time all the buildings were white.
During the apartheid era, Bo-Kaap was a "Muslims only" area that was the ONLY part of Cape Town where Cape Malay people were allowed to live. Anyone of another ethnicity or culture living in Bo-Kaap was forcibly relocated, mostly to townships on the city's outskirts. Bo-Kaap was one of the rare non-white neighborhoods actually within the city center.
After slaves were liberated in 1834, the houses in this area could be purchased by former slaves, who painted them in a panoply of vivid, almost fluorescent colors because for the first time they COULD choose the colors! The bright colors were an expression of their freedom.
