South Africa has three capitals. Pretoria is the executive capital, Cape Town the legislative capital and Bloemfontein the judicial capital. The split was the price of creating the country in 1910.
No country divides its capital more deliberately than South Africa. The split was designed, and it has survived every attempt to undo it.
| City | Branch | What sits there |
|---|---|---|
| Pretoria | Executive | The president, the cabinet and most government departments, at the Union Buildings. |
| Cape Town | Legislative | Parliament: the National Assembly and the National Council of Provinces. |
| Bloemfontein | Judicial | The Supreme Court of Appeal. |
The Constitutional Court, the highest court in the country, sits in Johannesburg, which is not a capital at all.
The Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 out of four colonies, two of them former Boer republics. Pretoria had been the capital of the South African Republic and Bloemfontein of the Orange Free State; Cape Town had the oldest parliament. Giving one city everything would have cost the union its members. Splitting the branches between three was the compromise that made the country possible.
The costs are real: ministers and civil servants move between Pretoria and Cape Town every year for the parliamentary session, and moving parliament to Pretoria has been proposed repeatedly since the 1990s. Nothing has been decided, and until something is, all three titles stand.
South Africa's provinces have their own capitals too, which is a separate question with nine separate answers.
The places above come from GeoNames, reconciled against Wikidata. Last checked 21 September 2026. How we know · Suggest a correction