The world already loves the Cape. Imagine what it could do with the keys

Walk through Cape Town International on a December evening and you hear it. German, Portuguese, Dutch, American English, all in the same queue.

Last December, just under 364,000 international passengers came through the airport. That was a record for the festive season. Over the whole of 2025, the airport passed 11.1 million passengers for the first time in its history, according to Wesgro, the province's tourism and trade agency.

People fly a long way to get here, and more of them come every year.

This is The Cape Case, our daily column on why the Western Cape should run its own affairs. Today's argument is tourism, the thing the Cape already does better than almost anywhere on earth. If you are new to the idea, our plain guide to the Capexit debate covers the background.

Is Cape Town really the best city in the world?

Travellers keep saying so. In January 2025, Time Out named Cape Town the best city in the world. In July 2025, more than 20,000 readers of the UK's Telegraph did the same. It was the seventh time the city won that Telegraph title, ahead of Seville and Sydney.

The wins kept coming in 2026.

Time Out still placed Cape Town sixth on its 2026 list of best cities overall, with Melbourne on top. Sixth in the world, and first for beauty, is a result most capitals would frame and hang on the wall.

Photo: Bl1zz4rd-editor / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

How many tourists visit the Western Cape?

About 1.5 million international tourists came to the Western Cape in 2025, the provincial government says. Arrivals grew by 11.1% on the year before.

They spent almost R26 billion. That works out to about R17,000 per visitor, money that lands in guesthouses, wine farms, restaurants, taxis and tour boats.

For this column, one figure stands out. The Western Cape earned a quarter of all the money South Africa made from foreign tourists in 2025. One province out of nine, a quarter of the takings.

Locals travel here too. South Africans made about 4 million overnight trips to the province in 2025, up 15.4%. They spent an average of R3,172 a trip, the highest of any province.

How many jobs does tourism create in Cape Town?

More than 106,000. That is how many jobs visitors and their spending supported in Cape Town in 2025, says the city's tourism body, Cape Town Tourism. Foreign visitors alone spent a record R19 billion in the city.

Think of the waiters in Kalk Bay, guides on Robben Island, cellar staff in Franschhoek and boat skippers in Hermanus.

Wesgro says tourism already employs nearly 7% of Cape Town's workforce. The province wants that above 10%, and it has set a goal to double tourism by 2035.

Which airlines fly direct to Cape Town?

More every year, and not by accident. Cape Town Air Access is a team run by Wesgro with the city and the province. Its job is to talk airlines into flying straight to Cape Town instead of through Johannesburg.

It works. In 2025, 3.3 million passengers flew in or out of the airport on international flights, up 7%.

70%30%

Domestic	7.80m	70%
International	3.30m	30%
Total two-way passengers	11.10m	100%

Source: Wesgro, from Airports Company South Africa figures, January 2026

The new routes keep landing. LATAM will fly direct from São Paulo in 2026, the first South American airline to do so. Emirates is adding a third daily flight from Dubai. Qatar Airways and Ethiopian Airlines are adding flights too, and Air Tanzania started a route in December 2025.

The province goes out and wins these deals itself, one airline at a time.

Photo: Matthias Bethke / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Can the Western Cape make its own visa rules?

No. And this is where the Cape hits a wall it did not build.

Visas are run by the national Department of Home Affairs in Pretoria. The province can win the awards and land the airlines. It cannot decide who gets a visa, how fast, or at what cost.

Take the remote working visa, the one that lets foreigners live here while working for a company abroad. The Western Cape pushed hard for it. Home Affairs missed its own deadline in June 2023, and the province said publicly that the visa could be done without changing the law. The rules only arrived in 2024, and were changed again in October that year.

Or take Asia. Home Affairs itself said in 2024 that China makes up only 1.8% of South Africa's foreign visitors, and India 3.9%. Chinese travellers made more than 100 million trips abroad in 2023. South Africa got about 93,000 of them.

The current minister, Leon Schreiber, has been trying to fix this, with an electronic travel permit and a fast lane for trusted tour groups from China and India. Good. But the Cape's biggest industry should not depend on which minister happens to hold the job in Pretoria.

A self-governing Cape could set its own visa rules for tourists, digital nomads and retirees. It could decide that a family from Mumbai or Shanghai gets an answer in days, not months.

Does the Western Cape keep its tourism money?

Much less than you would think. Visitors pay VAT on every hotel bill, wine tasting and restaurant meal. That VAT goes to SARS and into the national purse. Income tax from those 106,000 jobs does the same.

The province then gets back a share that Parliament decides. It does not get back what its visitors actually paid.

Imagine the Cape keeping that money. It could spend it where tourists and locals both feel it: Safer streets in the city centre, better roads up the West Coast, cleaner beaches, faster trains to the winelands. Every rand put into the places tourists love also lands in the neighbourhoods where tourism workers live.

The province already shows it can run things well, from how the city spends what you pay on your municipal bill to an airport voted the best in Africa 11 years running. You can follow the whole debate on our Cape independence page.

Photo: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

What would an independent Cape do for tourism?

Critics say the Cape needs the rest of South Africa to bring tourists in. The numbers say the opposite. Tourists already fly straight to Cape Town, from London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Doha and soon São Paulo, because they want the Cape.

They want Table Mountain and Camps Bay. They want the Cape Winelands, which almost every Cape Town tour already includes. They want the whales at Hermanus, the Cederberg in spring and the Knysna lagoon. All of it sits inside one province.

A Cape running its own affairs would have the brand the world already votes for, the airport it already loves and the routes it already wins. What it would add is the rest of the toolkit: Its own visa desk, its own tourism budget and the right to keep what its visitors spend.

The world has already made up its mind about the Cape. Seven Telegraph crowns, a record airport and R26 billion in a single year say so. The only people who still have to be convinced are in Pretoria, and the Cape has never needed their permission to be the best place on earth.