Touring Cape Town’s Secret Underground Tunnels

There are kilometres of tunnels under Cape Town.

Deep under the busy streets of Cape Town, kilometres of historic tunnels channel water from Table Mountain into the sea. And the water runs all year round.

The water catchment system dates back to Cape Town’s colonial past. The Dutch first built open canals in the 1600s. In the 1700s, the water became polluted and the tunnels were arched over and closed.

These underground water channels were decommissioned in the 1800s. But water from Table Mountain still flows through the canals into the sea. The river that runs down Table Mountain was called Camissa or “the place of sweet waters” by the indigenous Khoi.

The tours are guided by Matt Weisse of Good Hope Adventures.

Video: Ashraf Hendricks

To get underground, you have to climb through a manhole in the city centre into the dark tunnels about 2 to 3 metres in width. As you walk below the streets of Cape Town, you can hear a train passing nearby, cars driving over manholes, and sometimes the voices of people.

Tour guide Matt Weisse, of Good Hope Adventures, tells stories of the history of the tunnels, and how they were built.

You have to climb through a manhole to get underground.

It can get quite humid underground, says Weisse, but on the day we visited there was a cool draft blowing through the tunnel. Visitors are advised to wear a mask because it can be quite smelly underground. When we visited, the water running through the tunnel was clear, but Weisse says it can get quite dirty.

The walls and the arched roofs are brick. Cockroaches scurry about. Spiders are mostly motionless in their webs. Other creatures in the tunnels include frogs and crabs. Without lights, you can barely see anything at all.

The water running through the tunnels from Table Mountain never dries up. Even during the water crisis of 2017, the canals did not dry up. “So there is water, we must just know how to work with it,” Weisse says.

Many critters have made these tunnels their homes like spiders and frogs.

“We run out of water because we waste the water. We don’t manage it properly. We use our drinking water for watering our gardens, for washing our cars. Our dams can only service so many people. The city is growing.“

When he’s alone underground, he says, it can be quite eerie. “You hear the water, you hear the people and cars at the top, thundering noises, and you don’t know what it is.”

“There is something spooky about this place.”

Water from Table Mountain flows through this tunnel all year.

© 2026 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.

We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.