South Africa’s busiest flight hub, Johannesburg is the capital of Gauteng, a small but densely urbanized province that houses one-fifth of the country’s population. Although it tends to be treated as a transit point rather than an attraction in itself, Johannesburg is the country’s most integrated and forward-looking city, and it does offer some interesting cultural sightseeing.

Discover Johannesburg

Best explored on a guided tour, the city center is notable more for its contemporary urban buzz than for any architectural landmarks. The most interesting quarter is the Newtown Precinct, where the Market Theatre and informative Museum Africa sit alongside Mai-Mai Market, whose 150-plus stalls sell medicine and other paraphernalia associated with traditional healers.

The leafy northern suburbs of Rosebank and Sandton are popular for their plentiful boutique hotels, cosmopolitan selection of restaurants, and limitless shopping opportunities.

The sobering Apartheid Museum documents the segregationist policies that dominated every aspect of life in South Africa prior to the 1994 election won by Nelson Mandela’s ANC. The museum stands adjacent to Gold Reef City, a recreation of goldrush era Johannesburg situated above a disused goldmine that can be visited on a guided subterranean tour.

Highlights of the paleontologically bountiful Cradle of Humankind UNESCO World Heritage Site include the innovative displays at the Maropeng Visitors Centre, and the Sterkfontein Caves, which have yielded fossil remains of more than 500 individuals since 1966.

Guided day tours of Soweto usually visit the house where Nelson Mandela lived prior to his imprisonment in 1962 along with several sites associated with the Soweto Uprising of 1976. A more contemporary Soweto landmark is the calabash-shaped FNB Stadium where Spain defeated the Netherlands in the 2010 FIFA World Cup final.