Museum
Rhodes Cottage Museum
Seaside cottage where a mining magnate spent his final years chasing sea air for a failing heart.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to Rhodes Cottage Museum in Cape Town follows the mysterious ailment that shadowed Cecil Rhodes for three decades: fainting spells, blue lips and heart attacks that baffled Victorian doctors even as he built a diamond empire and a colony that took his name. It settles on 1901, when his physician, Leander Starr Jameson, chasing whatever breeze came off False Bay, ordered a hole cut straight through the cottage wall. Rhodes had bought this modest seaside cottage two years earlier, preferring its small rooms to the grand house he owned across the mountain.
This audio guide was created using AI.