No place in South Africa symbolises the universal struggle for freedom as powerfully as Robben Island.

Nelson Mandela officially opened the Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island on December 1, 2001, at the V&A Waterfront.

Declared a World Heritage Site on December 1, 1997, Robben Island has become a symbol of the triumph of the human spirit. A tour of the Robben Island Museum is a multi-faceted journey which begins at the Gateway, where multi-media exhibitions, a restaurant, an auditorium and a museum shop are housed.

A Robben Island Museum tour includes a half-hour ferry trip, a guided tour of the Maximum Security Prison, interaction with an ex-political prisoner, and a bus tour of the historic buildings and the unique flora and fauna of the 575-hectare Island.

Robben Island is known the world over as a place of banishment, isolation and imprisonment. For nearly 400 years colonial and apartheid rulers banished those regarded as political troublemakers, social outcasts and the unwanted of society to this rocky outcrop.

The islands unwilling inhabitants included slaves, political and religeous leaders who opposed Dutch colonialism in East Asia, Khoikoi and other African leaders who resisted British expansion in South Africa, leprosy sufferers, the sick, the mentally disturbed, French Vichy prisoners of war and during the past century, the poltical opponents of the apartheid regime in South Africa and Namibia.

During the apartheid years Robben Island became internationally known for its institutional brutality. Some freedom fighters spent more than a quarter of a century in a prison for their beliefs. Yet people such as Nelson Mandela emerged from here to lead South Africa to democracy with a message of tolerance, reconciliation and hope that moved the world.

Those imprisoned on the island succeeded on a psychological and political level in turning a prison “hellhole” into a symbol of freedom and personal liberation. Robben Island came to symbolise, not only for South Africa and the African continent, but also for the entire world, the triumph of the human spirit over enormous hardship and adversity. In doing so it has offered a world still troubled by division, social injustices and tolerence, hope for the furure.

Join us on a pilgrimage to this World Heritage Site.

The Robben Island experience begins at the Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island at the Clock Tower Precinct, V & A Waterfront, Cape Town.

The Gateway is the “front door” to Robben Island, a mainland symbol of the importance of the Island for South Africa’s young democracy. The Gateway houses a 150 seater auditorium, boardrooms, a Robben Island museum shop and restaurant. Digital, interactive exhibition spaces on all three floors of the Gateway building are open to the public, providing the historical context of Robben Island’s maximum Security Prison for the visitor, as well as reflecting the broader span of the Island’s history.