Table Mountain is one of the oldest mountains on Earth, its flat sandstone crown worn level long before the Himalayas or the Alps ever rose. It stands directly above Cape Town, ending not in a peak but in a plateau nearly three kilometres wide, whose highest point — Maclear's Beacon — reaches 1,086 metres. The cliffs are quartzite sandstone laid down 450 to 500 million years ago, framed on either side by the dome of Lion's Head and the ridge of Devil's Peak. What grows on the mountain is as rare as its shape: the slopes are cloaked in fynbos, a fine-leaved shrubland packing some 2,200 plant species — more than the whole of the United Kingdom — into barely 57 square kilometres, most of them found nowhere else. That richness made it part of the Cape Floral Region, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and in 2012 it was voted one of the New7Wonders of Nature.
The mountain's strangest sight is its own weather. When the south-easter — the wind Capetonians call the Cape Doctor — drives moist Atlantic air up the slopes, it condenses at the rim and pours back over the flat edge as a dense white cloud known as the 'tablecloth,' unrolling and vanishing with the shifting wind. Most visitors ride to the top in a cable car whose floor turns a slow full circle on the way up, opening a 360-degree view; others climb the steep ravine of Platteklip Gorge on foot. From the plateau, where tame dassies — the mountain's rock-hyrax residents — sun themselves on the stones, Cape Town spreads out below between two seas, the city bowl on one side and the Atlantic surf on the other. Seen from across the bay at Bloubergstrand, that level summit rising straight from the water is the image the world keeps of South Africa.