Ponte City Tower Tour

5 Nov 2022 by Amby

$18

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Dlala Nje Ponte City Experience

Drew and I are big fans of the movie Chappie so we wanted to take a tour of one of the filming locations—the iconic Ponte City tower, which, at 55 stories, is the tallest residential building in Africa. We really had no idea about what the tower was before we booked it, but were amazed to learn about its interesting and tragic history.

I learned so much during this one-hour tour with Dlala Nje, the only company offering tours of this high-security building. Tickets were about $18 each and there are many available time slots to add this to your Jburg itinerary.

View from the bottom.

Dlala Nje runs a community center in Ponte City, where we hung out while waiting for our tour to start. We were taken through some pretty strict security to the 51st floor of the building. We were offered drinks and snacks while our guide described the amazing views and local history.

View from the top.

Ponte City is a circular building with a hollowed out ‘core.’ It looks really cool. After we learned about the building’s history we went to the ground floor (where a scene in Chappie—and a lot of other films—were shot).

The core.

The ground looks dystopian, and you can see that the whole building was built on uneven rock. During a dark point in the building’s past, residents had thrown garbage down the core, creating a pile that was five stories high. It was difficult to imagine what that must have been like.