Short answers, pulled from the story.
Cape Town is the legislative capital of South Africa and the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. It became the legislative capital when Britain established the Union of South Africa in 1910, a status it retained when the Republic of South Africa was formed.
Cape Town was established in 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck and employees of the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) arrived to build a supply station for ships travelling to the East Indies. They constructed the Fort de Goede Hoop, later replaced by the Castle of Good Hope, making Cape Town South Africa's oldest city.
District Six was declared a whites-only area in 1965. All housing there was subsequently demolished and more than 60,000 residents were forcibly removed, many of them relocated to the Cape Flats. It remains the most infamous example of forced removals under the Group Areas Act in Cape Town.
Nelson Mandela delivered his first public speech since his imprisonment from the balcony of Cape Town City Hall on the 11th of February 1990, hours after being released. He had served 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment on Robben Island, located 10 km from the city in Table Bay.
Cape Town sits within the Cape Floristic Region biodiversity hotspot and has one of the highest levels of biodiversity of any equivalent urban area in the world. Table Mountain alone hosts an estimated 2,200 plant species - more than exist in the entire United Kingdom - with many endemic species found nowhere else on earth. The extinction rate of endemic plants within the city has been estimated at roughly three species per year since 1900.
Cape Town faced a severe water shortage between 2015 and 2018. According to Oxfam, the city reduced its water use from 1.2 billion litres per day in February 2015 to 516 million litres per day by 2018, cutting consumption by more than half over three years.