In the mid 1960s, the Cape Town City Council declared nature reserves on Table Mountain, Lion's Head, Signal Hill, and Silvermine.

Following a big fire above the city bowl in 1991, Attorney General Frank Kahn was appointed to reach consensus on a plan for rationalising management of the CPPNE.

This section covers Signal Hill, Lion's Head, Table Mountain proper, including the Back Table (the rear, lower part of the mountain), Devil's Peak, the Twelve Apostles (actually a series of seventeen peaks along the Atlantic seaboard), and Orange Kloof (a specially protected area not open to the public).

The Park lies in the heart of the Cape Floral Kingdom, which is a bio-diversity hot spot and seen by botanists as a botanical anomaly.

Today the Table Mountain range has the highest concentration of threatened species of any continental area of equivalent size in the world.

Some of the mature alien invasive trees that pose a threat to the fynbos region are Port Jackson, Rooikrans, Hakea, Pine and Blue Gum.

Unfortunately, the fertile lower slopes that were selected for the plantations are also the areas of the park which host the highest proportion of endemic and threatened species.

The park's current programme is to allow for the re-growth of the indigenous forests, while slowly removing the plantations of invasive trees.

This removal has been controversial however, as some of the pine plantations are recreational areas for people living in the wealthy suburbs adjacent to the park.

[10][11] Larger predators that historically roamed the area include the Cape lion, leopard (which persisted as late as the 1920s, and tracks are claimed to still be found today[12]), as well as spotted hyena and black-backed jackal.

Large herbivores similarly disappeared at the hands of the European settlers, for example elephant, black rhinoceros, kudu, eland, mountain zebra and bontebok, although the last three species were re-introduced to the Cape Point section of the park.

[13] Smaller mammals are still found in the park: caracal, rock hyrax and a variety of small antelope species, such as the Cape grysbok and notably the recently re-introduced klipspringer.

The population of the alien Himalayan tahr originated from a pair that escaped from the now defunct Zoological Gardens on Groot Schuur Estate below Devil's Peak in 1935.

They are highly visible and popular with tourists, but are capable of becoming extremely dangerous when they become accustomed to human beings and start to associate them with free food.

The Park lies in the heart of the Cape Floral Kingdom, which is a bio-diversity hot spot and seen by botanists as a botanical anomaly.