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Cliff-hugging Chapman's Peak Drive winding along the coast between Hout Bay and Noordhoek, Western CapeDiego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons

Best time to visit

Year-round; sunset drives are spectacular in summer

Chapman's Peak Drive — the M6 — is a coastal road of roughly 9 km linking Hout Bay and Noordhoek on Cape Town's Cape Peninsula. Chiselled into the near-vertical mountainside, it winds through 114 curves and skirts Chapman's Peak, the 593-metre southerly buttress of Constantiaberg, opening one Atlantic vista after another. South African Tourism calls it one of the most spectacular marine drives in the world.

The road was built using convict labour between 1915 and 1922 and opened to the public in 1922. After rockfall closures in the 1990s it was re-engineered with catch nets and a half-tunnel, reopening as a toll road in December 2003. It features in major events including the Cape Town Cycle Tour and the Two Oceans Marathon.

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