#1. Pretoria
South Africa’s administrative centre is a handsome city with some gracious old architecture, significant historical sites for South Africans of all races, prosperous leafy suburbs, and wide streets lined with jacarandas that burst into a beautiful purple haze in October and November.
It’s always been more of an Afrikaner city than Jo’burg, and hence more conservative and less cosmopolitan – this was once the beating heart of the apartheid regime, after all, and its very name a symbol of oppression. Today it’s home to a multitude of black civil servants and foreign embassy workers, who are infusing the city with a new sense of multiculturalism. The once blighted inner city is also undergoing something of a renaissance.
Officially, the greater Pretoria region, which also includes Centurion and a number of smaller towns, such as Cullinan, and townships such as Mamelodi, is called Tshwane.