Newlands Forest

Newlands Forest is a conservancy area on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain, beside the suburb of Newlands, Cape Town. It is owned and maintained by the Table Mountain National Parks Board, along with the City Parks Department of Cape Town, and includes a Fire Station, Nursery and Reservoir.

The forest itself is a popular walking and jogging destination (See trail map below), close and easily accessible from the city's southern suburbs. Due to its location on the mountain slopes, there are impressive views eastward over the Cape Flats.

Newlands Forest lies at a natural transition zone between endangered Granite Fynbos and Peninsula Shale Fynbos, in an area that also originally supported large indigenous forests. In the late 1800s, much of the indigenous forests were felled, and the fynbos cleared, to make way for commercial pine plantations, which still remain and account for the remainder of the land.

This is an endangered vegetation type, which can still be found on the southern edges of Newlands Forest. This ecosystem is endemic to the city of Cape Town and occurs nowhere else in the world. Existing only on the Cape Granite Formation, it naturally assumes the form of medium-dense tree vegetation, dominated by a variety of Protea and daisy species. The striking and iconic Silvertree grows in this vegetation type and a small population of these massive proteas can still be seen at Newlands forest. Historically this ecosystem supported a great many wild animals and there are at least 9 plant species which occur nowhere else in the world.
This vegetation is severely threatened, mainly by invasive alien plants. A total of 13 of this ecosystem's plant species are classed as endangered, two of them critically. One local species, the Wynberg Conebush, is now extinct.

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