Cape Town - Robben Island

Robben Island is known most famously as the prison island that held Nelson Mandela for most of his prison sentence. Tours of Robben Island and the prison museum here, are a must when visiting Cape Town. Robben Island sits just a few kilometres off the coast of Cape Town and can be reached by boat in around 30 minutes. After arriving at the island a bus whisks visitors around the sites, before a tour of the prison facility where ex inmates and prison guards show visitors around and answer your questions.

Robben Island had a brutal history long before Apartheid. It was the seventeenth century that saw the island first used for the ostracism of political and religious prisoners.

During the nineteenth century, Robben Island joined Australia as a convenient dumping ground for the British to rid themselves of all manner of criminals, vagrants and deserters. The isolated location of the island facilitated its use as a leper colony and a hospital for the mentally and terminally ill from the mid 1800s until the early 1930s. Hospital patients lived alongside prisoners and both were subjected to abuse and mistreatment. During the Second World War, Robben Island was used as a training and defence facility to thwart any possible attack from the Axis powers.

The modern era of the 1960s failed to bring about a policy change at the institution. If anything conditions for inmates became more extreme. Robben Island became a maximum security jail in 1961 when the Prisons Department took control. Nelson Mandela arrived in 1963 and faced hard labour, regular beatings and solitary confinement in a cell no bigger than a garden shed.

Today, Robben Island is a symbol of freedom and personal liberation. The cell of Nelson Mandela has been preserved and is a reflection of the sparse life he led here. The prison has been a museum since 1997 and in 1999 Robben Island was declared a UN World Heritage Site.

Tickets for the Robben Island tour cost R150 for adults and R75 for children. Children under 4 can visit free but must be included on the booking. Only purchase tickets for the Robben Island tour from the official vendor and book early if you’re travelling around the Christmas holiday.