Cape Town to Cape Point: A Complete Self-Drive Guide

Cape Point sits inside Table Mountain National Park, so getting there costs two separate fees on top of any tour price: a SANParks conservation fee to enter the reserve, and a separate Flying Dutchman Funicular fee if you want to ride up to the lighthouse rather than walk. This guide covers both, plus the drive itself, the stops worth making along the way, and how we rented our car for the trip.

Top tip: rather not drive yourself? Several day and half-day tours from Cape Town cover Cape Point and more: a full-day small group tour including penguin spotting, a full-day Instagram-focused small group tour, a full-day electric bike tour with a penguin visit, a full-day private tour, or a half-day Cape Peninsula tour. For something different, this scenic helicopter flight covers the whole peninsula from the air.

Cape Point conservation fees and funicular prices

Entering Cape Point means paying a SANParks conservation fee first, separate from anything a tour operator charges on top. As of the 2025/26 tariff year, SANParks prices daily entry to the Cape of Good Hope section of Table Mountain National Park at R110 ($7, £5) for South African residents, R225 ($14, £10) for SADC nationals, and R515 ($32, £24) for international visitors, roughly half those rates for children aged 2-12, all payable at the gate with ID required to claim the resident or SADC rate. SANParks raises these rates every 1 November, so expect a modest increase if you’re visiting after that date; check sanparks.org for the exact current figure before you go.

The Flying Dutchman Funicular up to the lighthouse is priced and ticketed separately from the park’s SANParks gate fee, since it’s run by the park’s own concession operator rather than SANParks itself. Cape Point’s own site lists funicular fares of R115 ($7, £5) for adults and R60 ($4, £3) for children and pensioners, with a second, slightly lower tier around R100/R52 that likely reflects ticket-office versus online pricing; pensioners need ID to claim their rate and that discount isn’t available for online pre-purchase. Whichever tier applies on the day, budget for the funicular as a cost on top of the conservation fee, not instead of it.

Cape Point’s gates open daily at 7am and close at 5pm, with entry cut off by sunset; the funicular, restaurant and shops run shorter hours than the park gates, so check the official Cape Point visitor information page for the current split before planning your day around a specific ride time.

Driving the Cape of Good Hope route from Cape Town

Muizenberg

There are two routes from Cape Town to Cape Point: the M3 through the mountains to the M64 and then the M4 along the coast, or the M5 straight to the coast and then the M4. Taking the coastal M4 route is worth the small detour, since it passes directly through Muizenberg and its stretch of coastline.

Muizenberg beach is known for good waves, surf shops and its row of colorful beach huts, and it’s an easy place for a long stroll. Free parking (tip the informal security attendant) is available on Beach Road, a minute’s walk from the sand. Shark sightings do occur along this coast, which is why Muizenberg has its own Shark Spotters program, a non-profit that works to reduce interactions between swimmers and white sharks; on our visit, the beach was calm enough for kids to be out practicing their surfing.

Boulders Beach

Boulders Beach, in Simon’s Town, is the peninsula’s penguin colony and worth its own stop between Muizenberg and Cape Point. We’d already seen Simon’s Town itself on a whale watching trip a couple of days earlier, so we drove straight to the beach. Read the full details in our separate guide to the penguins at Boulders Beach.

Cape Point Nature Reserve

Cape Point Nature Reserve is built around a single main road running from the entrance gate down to Cape Point itself, with side tracks branching off to viewing points and beaches, so it’s genuinely hard to get lost even without the paper map the gate gives you with your receipt. Several hiking trails run through the reserve, but the terrain inland stays fairly uniform throughout; the payoff here is the coastal views from the cliffs and beaches rather than the inland walking itself, so a full day is only worth setting aside if hiking specifically interests you.

The reserve’s three headline sites are Cape Point itself, the Cape Point Lighthouse, and the Cape of Good Hope. A large parking lot sits at the base of the lighthouse trail, where baboons are a near-guaranteed sighting; unlike baboons we saw elsewhere on our trip, the ones at Cape Point are used to visitors and will check car windows and bags for food, so keep food out of sight. We watched one open a stolen can of Coke and finish it in one go.

Walking up to the lighthouse is short but steep; the Flying Dutchman Funicular (priced above) covers the same climb in about three minutes if you’d rather skip it. From the lighthouse platform, Cape Point’s actual tip is visible behind the lighthouse at the edge of the peninsula, though reaching it on foot appeared to require a different trail than the one from the lighthouse itself.

From the lighthouse, a trail also runs along Dias Beach to the Cape of Good Hope sign, or you can drive back down and over. We arrived at the sign right behind a tour bus, so instead of a photo with the sign, we got a photo of the queue for it. Cape of Good Hope is the most south-westerly point of the African continent, not the southernmost, which is Cape Agulhas, also the point where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans officially meet.

Practical information on visiting Cape Point

Accommodation inside the park: Olifantsbos Guesthouse and the Eland and Duiker Cottages sit within the reserve boundaries, and Smitswinkel campground is just outside the main gate; camping fees don’t include the SANParks conservation fee, which is charged separately.

Getting there: driving yourself is the simplest option, and the route is straightforward enough to follow on Google Maps; download an offline map if you’d rather not use data. If you’re not driving, this full-day tour and this private full-day tour both get good reviews.

Other stops on the Cape Peninsula

We’d planned to also stop at Kommetjie Beach, Noordhoek Beach, Hout Bay Harbour and Camps Bay, plus drive Chapman’s Peak, but ran out of daylight after lingering longer than planned at our earlier stops. Chapman’s Peak Drive is a toll road between Hout Bay and Noordhoek, with a standard single-trip toll of roughly R60-70 that’s reviewed annually each July, so treat any specific figure as a guide rather than a guarantee. The road also closes periodically for bad weather or rockfall risk, as we learned from a news report later in our trip, so check chapmanspeakdrive.co.za for its current status before building a day around it.

Renting a car in South Africa

We picked up our rental car on our last day in Cape Town, using it for the Cape Point drive and then the rest of our South Africa road trip. We used Sunny Cars, whose all-in-one pricing includes insurance, unlimited mileage, local taxes, airport charges where applicable, free date changes, and no separate booking fee, so the price you see during research is the price you pay.

Sunny Cars provided a voucher so we could experience their booking process ourselves. We booked a compact car for under €400 for 13 days, including an extra driver, Express Service, and city-center pickup with airport drop-off. Changing our pickup time by email afterward was handled without issue. The one hiccup was with the local rental partner rather than Sunny Cars itself: Express Service is meant to let you complete paperwork online so you only sign at pickup, but we still had to fill in a form on arrival; Sunny Cars looked into it as soon as we flagged it. How a company handles a hiccup like that matters more to me than the hiccup itself, and on that front Sunny Cars did well.

Where to stay in Cape Town

We spent three nights in a rented apartment in Green Point and two nights at the boutique Blackheath Lodge. Check prices and availability at Blackheath Lodge here. For more options across the city, comparing hotels in Cape Town covers neighborhoods closer to the airport or the city center if Green Point doesn’t suit your route.

Don’t forget travel insurance

Travel insurance covers you if part of your trip is cancelled, you get sick or hurt abroad, or your electronics break or get stolen. Check out SafetyWing. Their plans are flexible enough to sign up for even after a trip has started, and their claims process handled a personal COVID claim without complications.

We were offered a rental car voucher for this trip by Sunny Cars.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

The 5 tips below come from driving this route ourselves and from re-checking the park’s fees and hours, and each one is something we would do differently next time.

1. Budget two fees, not one. The SANParks conservation fee at the gate and the Flying Dutchman Funicular are charged by different operators, so an international adult pays R515 to get in and another R115 to ride up to the lighthouse. The card machine at the gate is also at the mercy of the mobile signal out there, and ours took several minutes to go through. Keep the map handed over with the receipt, since it marks what is worth stopping for and in which order.
2. Leave Cape Town early enough to be through the gate by mid-morning. The park opens at 7am and closes at 5pm with entry cut off by sunset, and we lost our last four planned stops by lingering at the first ones. It got dark on us before Chapman’s Peak, which is the part of the peninsula we most regret skipping.
3. Keep food out of sight at the lighthouse car park. Cape Point’s baboons are used to visitors in a way the ones elsewhere on our trip were not, and they look through car windows and bags for anything worth taking. We watched one open a stolen can of Coke and finish it in a single sitting.
4. Get to the Cape of Good Hope sign ahead of the coaches. We arrived just behind a full tour bus and every passenger queued to be photographed with it one at a time, so I gave up and photographed the queue instead. Coaches arrive in a bunch, so a few minutes either side of one makes the difference between a photograph and a wait.
5. Check chapmanspeakdrive.co.za on the morning you plan to drive it. The road closes for bad weather and rockfall risk with no notice, which we found out from a news report later in the trip, and the single-trip toll of roughly R60 to R70 is reviewed every July, so treat any figure you read as a guide rather than a quote.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the first-hand notes in this post come from her self-drive trip along the Cape Peninsula. The team covers South Africa for independent travellers, including the tours, car rental and park fees worth knowing before a Cape Point day trip, and updates this page when prices and hours change.