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Johannesburg does not ease you in gently. South Africa's largest city announces itself through scale and contradiction, a place where the Highveld plateau sits at nearly 1,800 metres above sea level and the skyline competes with a canopy of jacaranda trees that turns the northern suburbs violet each spring. It was gold that built this city in 1886, and the speed of that founding, frantic, speculative, and ruthlessly commercial, left a character that persists. Johannesburg thinks in terms of ambition and reinvention rather than heritage and preservation, which makes it unlike any other African metropolis.

The inner city has been through several lives. Neighbourhoods such as Maboneng and Braamfontein have drawn artists, architects, and independent traders back into streets that were written off a generation ago. The Constitutional Hill precinct, built on the site of a former prison that held both Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi at different points in history, now houses South Africa's highest court and a museum that confronts the country's legal past without flinching. Further north, the leafy suburbs of Rosebank and Sandton represent a different register entirely, polished and commercial, with galleries and restaurants that would not look out of place in any global city.