The Company's Garden sits at Cape Town's green heart, and it began not as a park but as a farm. In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck was sent here to grow vegetables for Dutch East India Company sailors crippled by scurvy on the long haul to the East Indies. What started as rows of beetroot and herbs slowly became an ornamental garden filled with exotic trees from across the British Empire: magnolias from North America, rubber trees from India, New Zealand Christmas trees. One ancient Saffron Pear, planted by van Riebeeck himself and now propped on steel crutches, is thought to be the oldest exotic tree in the country.

A statue of Cecil Rhodes still points imperiously northward, and Queen Victoria surveys the scene from her plinth with well-earned disapproval. VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace the Garden's layered history, from its scurvy-fighting Dutch origins to the colonial ambitions that reshaped it.