Cape Town, South Africa, is one of fourteen destinations featured on Waddles' World Tour, RestMap's free daily 5-letter word puzzle. Each week's puzzles are themed around a different city, and every solve unlocks an authored travel fact about the place. The Table Mountain anchors the Cape Town week. Below are five sourced facts that turn up across the Cape Town puzzle set.
In 2018, Cape Town came within 90 days of 'Day Zero' — the date when municipal water taps would be physically shut off, forcing 4 million residents to queue at 149 collection points for a daily ration of just 25 liters per person. It would have been the first major modern city to run out of water.
Source: National Geographic, World Economic ForumDuring the 2018 water crisis, Cape Town residents were limited to 50 liters of water per day — roughly one 6-minute shower. Flushing a toilet uses about 9 liters, so residents adopted the mantra 'If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down' as an official city guideline.
Source: Time Magazine, WaterAidOn December 3, 1967, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first successful human-to-human heart transplant. The patient, Louis Washkansky, received the heart of accident victim Denise Darvall, regained consciousness, and spoke with his wife — before dying 18 days later of pneumonia.
Source: Wikipedia Christiaan Barnard, PBSTable Mountain has more plant species on its slopes than the entire United Kingdom. The Table Mountain area hosts over 2,200 species of flowering plants, at least 90 of which exist nowhere else on Earth. It sits within the Cape Floral Kingdom — the smallest but richest of the world's six floral kingdoms.
Source: nature-reserve.co.za, Wikipedia Biodiversity of Cape TownNapoleon Bonaparte had 30 bottles of 'Grand Constance' wine from Cape Town's Groot Constantia estate shipped to his exile on St. Helena Island every month until his death in 1821. This estate, founded in 1685, is South Africa's oldest wine farm with 334+ years of uninterrupted wine production.
Source: grootconstantia.co.za, Imbibe Magazine