Grand Parade

This guide to Grand Parade in Cape Town opens with a Holi-style colour festival on a March afternoon, launched here in 2013 on Darling Street and borrowing its name and gesture from the centuries-old Indian celebration. It then reaches back through the square's older history: soldiers from the Castle of Good Hope drilling on this same field, oak trees the burghers planted in 1763, and a fountain promised in 1806 that vanished without ever being finished. Those same oaks still stand at the square's edges.