Mostert's Mill

This guide to Mostert's Mill in Cape Town opens with a paradox: a windmill said to be two centuries old whose moving parts are barely a few years young. It traces the fire of 18 April 2021 that swept up from the highway below Table Mountain and gutted the tower's teak windshaft, sails and timber interior, leaving only stone walls and millstones standing. It reaches back to the 1930s, when a Dutch millwright named Christiaan Bremer first rebuilt the derelict mill's machinery from nothing, and follows the volunteers and Dutch master millers who set out afterward to relearn that same nearly vanished craft.