Summer is on the way. The first signs of spring are here — flowers in bloom, milder days, longer light — and outdoor entertaining is beckoning. It’s a good season to think about venue hire in Hout Bay, and we’re looking to bring the amphitheatre to life more regularly now that the winter chill is abating.

Over the years the amphitheatre has hosted live bands, choir performances, outdoor movie screenings, children’s holiday programmes, birthday celebrations, fundraisers, and community events. 

Tiered seating faces a covered stage, so performers, speakers, schools, and organisations have a proper stage to work from, and your audience has somewhere to sit without you setting up a single chair.  It’s particularly appealing in summer, when long days, fresh sea air, and late sunsets make outdoor events more inviting.

A grove of centuries-old Milkwood trees surrounds the amphitheatre, giving it a lush green backdrop. Shell, bone, and traces of old fires have turned up in the ground beneath these trees — leftovers from meals of shellfish and ostrich eggs that Khoi and strandloper groups cooked here centuries ago. Fishermen later strung their nets across the same branches to mend them, and fragments of old netting are still caught up overhead. 

Hout Bay takes its name from the forests that once covered this valley, most of which Dutch settlers cleared for timber to build the Castle of Good Hope and other early Cape Town buildings. The Milkwoods were spared because their gnarled, twisted trunks were no good for furniture or boatbuilding, and they’re protected under Western Cape regulation today.