Lavender Hill, Cape Town

The Cape Flats (Afrikaans: Die Kaapse Vlakte) is an expansive, low-lying, flat area situated to the southeast of the central business district of Cape Town. To many people in Cape Town, the area is known simply as "The Flats".

Described by some as "apartheid's dumping ground", from the 1950s the area became home to people the apartheid government designated as non-White. Race-based legislation such as the Group Areas Act and pass laws either forced non-white people out of more central urban areas designated for white people and into government-built townships in the Flats, or made living in the area illegal, forcing many people designated as Black and Coloured into informal settlements elsewhere in the Flats. The Flats have since then been home to much of the population of Greater Cape Town.

In geological terms, the area is essentially a vast sheet of aeolian sand, ultimately of marine origin, which has blown up from the adjacent beaches over a period on the order of a hundred thousand years. Below the sand, the bedrock is in general the Malmesbury Shale, except on part of the western margin between Zeekoevlei to the south and Claremont and Wetton to the north, where an intrusive mass of Cape Granite is to be found.

To the west the expanse of the Cape Flats is limited by rising ground that slopes up to the steep cliffs of the Cape Peninsula mountain chain (see the photograph on the left), while in the east the land rises gradually towards the equally rugged cliffs of Hottentots Holland mountains and other elevated regions of the interior of the Boland.

Most of the sand is unconsolidated; however, in some places near the False Bay coast the oldest sand dunes have been cemented into a soft sandstone. These formations contain important fossils of animals such as the extinct Cape lion and also provide evidence that stone-age people hunted here tens of thousands of years ago.

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Wikipedia