Sea Point Pavilion

This guide to Sea Point Pavilion in Cape Town follows the site through two storm-wrecked bathing pavilions before the art deco building you see now went up around 1950, designed by Jacob Cornelis Jongens with curved stairways and fish-carved vents. It lingers on the pool's coldest feature: unheated Atlantic seawater that barely climbs past twenty-four degrees even in summer, and the open-water swimmers who use it as a training ground. You'll hear about the divers who climb the five-metre platform on a grey winter morning, and what draws them in anyway. Best watched from beside the diving pool, wind off the sea.