Cape Town's Saturday Markets

Cape Town does Saturday mornings at the market, and not as a show for visitors. People come with a basket and a list, meet their friends, eat breakfast standing up and go home with a week of vegetables. This morning puts you among them at two markets with quite different characters.

The first is the Oranjezicht City Farm Market. It grew out of a community farm planted on an old bowling green in the neighbourhood of that name, and it now sets up by the sea at Granger Bay. Small growers bring what came out of the ground that week, beside bakers, cheesemakers, a fishmonger or two and stalls cooking to order.

The guide knows the growers, which is the point of having one. You are introduced rather than served, and you taste the things you would have walked past: a heritage tomato, fynbos honey, a cheese from a small dairy in the Swartland. Go hungry. The coffee queue is long for a reason.

Breakfast is whatever looks best that morning: an egg roll, something ladled from a pot, a pastry still warm. Sit at the long tables with everybody else and watch how the city shops, with children on shoulders, neighbours catching up and regulars who know every stallholder by name.

Then across town to Woodstock and the Old Biscuit Mill, a former biscuit factory turned into studios, shops and kitchens round a courtyard. On Saturdays the Neighbourgoods market fills it: long shared tables, stalls cooking everything from oysters to bobotie, and designers’ tables round the edges with clothes, ceramics and prints. It is louder and busier than the farm market, and by late morning it is full, which is why the morning runs in this order.

You come away having eaten a little of everything and bought more than you meant to. Pair it with a day in the Winelands for the other half of the Cape’s table, or come back on a weekday for Woodstock’s studios and see the neighbourhood at work.

Good to know

• Saturdays only. If your Cape days miss one, we will fill the gap with something else.
• Food and purchases are paid on the spot. Many stalls take cards; some are cash only.
• Go hungry and go slowly. Grazing is the whole method.
• Neighbourgoods is crowded by late morning. Keep bags and phones close, as at any busy market.
• Bring your own bag. The farm market would rather you did.