Cape Town - A walking route through the Cape Town CBD, showcasing museums, retailers and restaurants, already exists, but will now be officially mapped and marketed as a tourist destination.
The roughly 1.5km City Walk aims to immerse travellers in Cape Town’s urban culture, as well as generate foot traffic during off-peak hours, said Brett Hendricks, director of the Cape Point Partnership.
Hendricks announced the initiative on Wednesday at the second annual World Travel Market Africa at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, where mayor Patricia de Lille, Deputy Minister of Tourism Tokozile Xasa, chief executive of Cape Town Tourism Enver Duminy and other industry stakeholders gathered to cut the ribbon and launch the new path.
City Walk has made the Cape Town Big 6, a marketing conglomerate of six of the city’s mainstay tourist attractions, now the Big 7 – joining Cape Point, Robben Island, Groot Constantia, Table Mountain Cableway, Kirstenbosch and the V&A Waterfront.
The Cape Town Partnership (CPT), a public-private organisation founded in 1999 to manage, develop and promote the CBD, has spent the past 18 months designing the route and lobbying the Big 6 for admittance.
The course begins in the Company’s Garden and winds through St George’s Mall to Waterkant Street, continuing up the Fan Walk (a pedestrian link along Darling, Strand, Adderley, Riebeek and Waterkant streets) to end at St Andrew’s Square, on the corner of Riebeek and Buitengracht streets.
The chief executive of Cape Town Partnership, Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana, said just like the public art, architecture and historical sites that span city centre, the purpose of City Walk is layered.
After learning that urban and culture tourism now accounts for 70 percent of global tourism, she said the CTP sought first to curate a recognisable route where travellers can easily and casually engage with locals and perceive an authentic Cape Town experience, akin to Barcelona’s La Ramblas or Paris’ Champs Elysées.
But Makalima-Ngewana said the point of the City Walk is to activate the CBD as a 24-hour hotspot of sorts, which, after the hours of 5pm on weekdays and 1pm on Saturdays, she called “safe, clean, and empty”.
She said there will be no correlating ramp-up of security or police measures as visitors are encouraged to frequent the area at night, citing 70 active security cameras and calling it one of the safest city centres in the country.
According to police crime statistics for the 2013/2014 financial year, 643 cases of common assault, 956 cases of common robbery, and 548 cases of robbery with aggravating circumstances were reported in the city central. In all, the area saw 2 380 cases of contact crimes, or crimes against a person.
Makalima-Ngewana said the course, whose implementation plan does not currently include any informational plaques or site headquarters, will organically stimulate a market of consumers, who will in turn prompt retailers to self-activate and extend or alter their hours of operation.
She also called the City Walk “absolutely” a pilot project, saying she wants to see Bellville or Khayelitsha, for example, curate their own walking tours.
The City Walk will officially launch on Saturday, the first in a series of themed walks taking place every third Saturday of the month, called City Walk Saturdays.
This weekend’s theme is play, and will feature giant board games, face painting, stilt walkers, chalk drawing, jumping castles and more along the route from 10am to 2pm.
Makalima-Ngewana said the tour takes anywhere from 40 minutes to four hours, depending how long someone wishes to linger along the way.
Cape Argus