Did You Know?
History is made from large forces - trade, war, empire, politics. But it is remembered through stories. Here are some of the Castle’s most memorable details.
The Castle was originally built right on the edge of the sea. Today it sits about a kilometre inland - not because the Castle moved, but because Cape Town reclaimed land from the ocean in the 1930s and 1940s.
The coast moved. The Castle didn’t.
The Castle has flown six different flags and has never been taken by direct assault. Every single time it changed hands, the fighting had already happened somewhere else. Its walls were never truly tested.
The bell in the Castle’s tower was cast in Amsterdam in 1697. It weighs 300 kilograms and has been ringing ever since. This makes it the oldest functioning bell in South Africa. It has been ringing longer than the United States has been a country.
In 1895, the Castle’s signal cannon (the Noon Gun), fired daily to allow ships in the harbour to set their chronometers as a tradition since 1806, fired 90 minutes early - at 10:30 instead of noon. The investigation found the culprit: a spider had crawled into the electrical relay and triggered the firing mechanism.
Central Cape Town was not pleased.
During another firing, the rammer (the rod used to push the powder charge into the cannon barrel) was accidentally left inside when the cannon was fired. It flew across a portion of Cape Town and killed a horse.
The Donker Gat (Dark Hole) dungeon flooded in winter. Prisoners chained to the walls sometimes could not reach higher ground. Some drowned. It was used for the most significant prisoners - the people the authorities most wanted silenced.
Governor Van Noodt sentenced seven soldiers to death in 1729. One cursed him from the gallows. Van Noodt was found dead in his chair the same day. The cause was never established. His ghost, according to legend, still walks the battlements.
Fritz Duquesne, a Boer prisoner held in the Castle during the Anglo-Boer War, spent months tunnelling through the Castle’s cement walls with an iron spoon. A falling stone trapped him in his own tunnel before he could finish. He survived, escaped by other means, and became an international spy. He was featured in a series of real-world espionage stories.
The Khoekhoe called the Castle kui keip -
stone enclosure.
The Dutch called it
Kasteel de Goede Hoop - Castle of Good
Hope.
Same building. Two completely opposite meanings. A refuge for those allowed inside, and a wall keeping everyone else out. Whose name a place carries always tells you something about who it was built for.
The De Kat Balcony, where governors once proclaimed laws and read death sentences, now faces the four bronze Kings of the Castle. The colonial portraits that used to hang on the interior walls have been taken down and replaced with images of resistance.