Johannesburg travel guide

Top 10 sights in Johannesburg

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© James Ball · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Satyagraha House

   The house where Gandhi lived in 1908 and 1909 with the architect Hermann Kallenbach, in the years he was working out the method he came to call satyagraha. It is now a museum and a guest house, kept in the spare style the two of them adopted.

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2. 

   2© NJR ZA · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Apartheid Museum

   A museum of apartheid opened in November 2001 beside the Gold Reef City complex. Tickets are issued at random as white or non-white and you must use the corresponding entrance, which is the first of many decisions the building makes for you.

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3. 

   3© Kemptonreporter · CC BY 2.5

   Hillbrow Tower

   A telecommunications tower of two hundred and sixty-nine metres finished in 1971, the tallest structure in Africa for forty-five years. Its revolving restaurant closed in 1981 and the tower has been shut to the public since.

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4. 

   4© Rachel from London, UK · CC BY 2.0

   Kliptown

   The oldest residential part of Soweto, laid out in 1891 on farmland southwest of Johannesburg. The Congress of the People adopted the Freedom Charter on open ground here in June 1955, and the square is now a memorial to it.

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5. 

   5© Simisa (talk · contribs) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Thokoza

   A township in Ekurhuleni southeast of Alberton, built on the site of the old Palmietfontein airport. It was one of the worst-hit places in the hostel violence between 1990 and 1994, when several thousand people died on the East Rand.

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6. 

   6© Janek Szymanowski · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Johannesburg Art Gallery

   A gallery in Joubert Park with over nine thousand works, the largest art collection in Africa, in a building designed by Edwin Lutyens and opened in 1915. Years of leaking roofs and closed wings have left it a difficult visit, and its holdings deserve better.

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7. 

   7© NJR ZA · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Johannesburg Zoo

   A zoo of fifty-five hectares in the northern parkland of Johannesburg, opened in 1904 on land left to the city by a mining magnate. It is one of the older zoos in Africa and a standard Sunday outing.

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8. 

   8

   Gold Reef City

   A theme park built on a gold mine that closed in 1971, its streets dressed as the boom town that sprang up after gold was struck on the Witwatersrand in 1886. Visitors can go underground and watch a gold pour; the Apartheid Museum stands on the same grounds.

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9. 

   9© Robert Cutts · CC BY 2.0

   Diepmeadow

   A large section of Soweto laid out in 1959 to house people forced out of Alexandra under apartheid removals. Taken together with neighbouring Meadowlands it is informally called Diepmeadow, though Orlando lies between the two.

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10. 

    10© James Ball · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Gandhi Square

    A square in the central business district renamed for Gandhi, who practised law in the courts on it from 1903. The bronze shows him young and in barrister's robes rather than in the loincloth of the later photographs.

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1. 

   1© de:user:Zakysan and the only one ☝️ of their life is that he is not a good 😊 and · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Johannesburg CBD

   The central business district of Johannesburg, where the gold boom threw up high-rise blocks in the early twentieth century. Corporate flight hollowed it out in the 1990s; regeneration has been under way since, unevenly, block by block.

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2. 

   2© Babak Fakhamzadeh from Chiang Mai, Thailand · CC BY 2.0

   Hector Pieterson Museum

   Two blocks from the spot where twelve-year-old Hector Pieterson was shot on 16 June 1976, the museum tells the story of the Soweto uprising in which more than 170 schoolchildren died. It opened on the same date in 2002, built around Sam Nzima's photograph of the dying boy.

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3. 

   3© fiverlocker from Brighton, UK · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Melville

   A bohemian suburb west of the central business district, its 7th Street lined with restaurants, bookshops and bars filled by students from the nearby University of Johannesburg and Wits. The rocky grassland of the Melville Koppies reserve rises behind it.

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4. 

   4© Britfan97 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Nelson Mandela Square

   A square in Sandton, laid out to resemble a European town square and surrounded by shops, with a six-metre bronze of Mandela mid-stride at one end. It is the centre of the business district that drew the money out of the old city.

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5. 

   5© NJR ZA · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Johannesburg Botanical Garden

   A botanical garden at Emmarentia, wrapped around a dam, with a rose garden of tens of thousands of bushes and a herb garden below it. It is used as much for dog walking and weddings as for botany.

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6. 

   6© No machine-readable author provided. Moongateclimber assumed (based on copyright · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Regina Mundi

   The largest Catholic church in South Africa, in Soweto. When political meetings were banned it became the place they were held instead, and police fired into it during the 1976 uprising — the bullet holes in the ceiling and the broken marble altar were left as they were.

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7. 

   7© Greg · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Johannesburg South Africa Temple

   A temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at Parktown, dedicated in 1985 and the first the church built on the African continent. Only members may enter, but the grounds are open.

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8. 

   8© Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication

   A square at Kliptown in Soweto, on the ground where the Congress of the People met in 1955 and adopted the Freedom Charter. A monument carrying the text of the charter stands on it, and a museum and market occupy the surrounding buildings.

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   9

   Anglo-Boer War Memorial

   A memorial of 1913 by Herbert Baker, with a bronze angel on a stone drum, raised to the Witwatersrand men who fought as British soldiers in the Boer War. It was rededicated in 1999 to the dead of both sides, which took ninety years.

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10. 

    10© Thomas.macmillan (talk) · CC BY 3.0

    MuseuMAfricA

    A museum in the old fruit and vegetable market at Newtown, opened in 1994, covering how Johannesburg was made by gold and migrant labour. Reconstructed shack interiors and the record of the 1950s treason trial are its strongest rooms.

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