The city grew out of a settlement founded on the shore below the mountains in 1652 by Jan van Riebeeck, for the Dutch East India Company.

Indigenous animals include porcupines, caracals, small grey mongoose, rock hyraxes (also known as dassies), and many species of bird.

In the 1930s, a few Himalayan tahrs (wild goats) escaped from a zoo on the slopes of Devil's Peak and bred until their population on the Table Mountain range was over 700.

The tough sandstone rests conformably upon a basal shale that in turn lies unconformably upon a basement of older (Late Precambrian) rocks (Malmesbury shale/slate and the Cape Granite).

The basal shale and the older rocks below it weather much faster than the TMS and for this reason the lower slopes are smoother in all parts, with few outcrops and deeper soil.

As it turns east around the bulk of Devil's Peak the road cuttings expose a few famous geological unconformities, which illustrate very clearly that the Malmesbury rocks were folded, baked, intruded by granite and planed down by millions of years of erosion before the area sank below the ocean and a new sequence of sediments, including the TMS, began to accumulate.

The stranger turned out to be the devil and Van Hunks eventually won the contest, but not before the smoke that they had made had covered the mountain, forming the table cloth cloud.

[9] The story was captured by the 19th century poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his poem Jan van Hunks (alternatively called The Dutchman's Wager).

[11] Forty years before Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape in 1497, the Venetian cartographer Fra Mauro created a map of the world for King Alfonso V of Portugal, based on knowledge drawn from the Arabians.

On this map, which became the definitive view of the world for the early Portuguese explorers, he named the southernmost tip of Africa Cabo de Diab – the Devil's Cape.

On 26 May 1971, three South African Air Force Hawker-Siddeley HS125 (Code named Mercurius) aircraft crashed into Devil's Peak, killing all 11 on board.

The aircraft, flying by sight along the N2 highway, banked to the right three seconds too late, crashing into the side of the mountain not far above Rhodes Memorial and the University of Cape Town.