Golden Acre (Cape Town)

The Golden Acre is a shopping mall on the corner of Adderley and Strand Streets in downtown Cape Town.

In 1975, excavations during the construction process revealed remnants of the northern portion of a storage dam built in 1663 where the coast line once was.

[3] The 17th century Governor of the Cape Colony, Zacharias Wagenaer, was very concerned about providing regular drinking water to inhabitants and visiting ship crews alike.

Soldiers, gardeners, slaves, boys, and girls, essentially everyone in the settlement, worked to dig up and break the bedrock.

After two months of work, the dam stretched 45 m long, 15 m wide, and 1½ m deep, storing 700,000 L of water from the Fresh River.