Live road status
Is the pass open?
The state of the road, why it is in that state, and what has to happen before it changes. Published by the control room and updated on this page without a refresh.
Placeholder artwork · client photography drops straight in
The real centreline, 9,72 km gate to gate. When the pass is closed the route draws in the closure colour, so the state of the road is legible from the map alone.
Live cameras
Look at the pass before you drive it.
Five positions along the route — both gates, the plaza, and the two points where the weather turns first. Cloud sits on the summit long before it reaches Hout Bay, which is why the Lookout camera is the one worth checking.
Hout Bay gate
South, up the pass. The first camera anybody checks before setting out from town.
Toll plaza
Both carriageways and the lane canopy — queue length at a glance.
East Fort
The exposed shoulder where the south-easter hits first.
Chapman's Peak View Point
West over the Atlantic. Cloud and visibility read here before anywhere else.
Noordhoek gate
North into the pass, with Long Beach behind the camera.
When the feeds arrive
Each panel above takes one URL. Nothing else changes — no rebuild, no redesign. Still images refresh on a timer; a video stream plays in place.
We need an introduction to Carl to get the camera addresses and confirm what the existing hardware can serve.
Arrange itCamera images are for road conditions only. They are not recorded by this website, and nothing on this page identifies a vehicle or a person — see the privacy notice.
Why the pass closes
A closure is a decision, not a fault.
Chapman's Peak is cut into a live cliff face above the Atlantic. Every closure on this road is a judgement made in advance of something happening, which is why it can shut on a day that looks perfectly fine from Hout Bay.
High wind
The south-easter funnels through the pass and hits high-sided vehicles broadside on the exposed sections above Hout Bay. The road closes on measured wind speed, not on forecast — which is why a closure can arrive on an otherwise clear day.
Affects high-sided vehicles, caravans, motorcycles and cyclists first.
Rockfall risk and clearing
The pass is cut into a cliff of Table Mountain sandstone sitting on softer Malmesbury shale. Water working into that junction is what brings material down, so the risk rises during and after sustained rain rather than during dry weather.
Closures are precautionary. The road reopens once the face has been inspected and cleared.
Heavy rain
Standing water, reduced visibility and debris washed onto the carriageway. Often paired with the rockfall assessment above rather than being a separate closure.
Sections nearest the cliff face are affected first.
Fire
Fynbos fires on the slopes above the road close it for the safety of both drivers and the crews working the mountain, and to keep the route clear for emergency vehicles.
Usually a full closure with no partial option.
Maintenance and events
Planned work on the road surface, the catch fences or the drainage, and sanctioned events such as the annual cycle tour. These are published in advance as notices.
Announced ahead of time wherever possible.
How it stays open
The road is a permanent piece of maintenance.
Nine kilometres. One hundred and fourteen curves. Not one of them straight — and every one of them held open by work that mostly happens when nobody is watching.
The half tunnel
Rather than blast a full bore through the buttress, the engineers cut a shelf and left the mountain overhead. You drive under the cliff rather than through it — the single most photographed piece of road in the country, and a working piece of rockfall protection.
Catch fences and draped mesh
Much of the cliff above the carriageway carries steel mesh and catch structures designed to hold or slow material before it reaches the road. They are inspected routinely, and inspection is one of the planned reasons the pass closes.
Cut into the contact zone
The route follows the junction between the granite and the sandstone above it, which is what makes the views possible and the maintenance permanent. The road was surveyed on foot in 1914 and called steep, rotten and unstable. It was built anyway.
Drainage
Because water is the mechanism behind most rockfall here, the drainage is as much a safety system as the barriers are. Blocked drainage after a storm is a legitimate reason to hold the road shut.
Descriptive only. Specific engineering figures, inspection intervals and the current maintenance programme should come from the operator before this page goes to a live domain.
The record
Every change, on the record.
Every status change is written to a permanent, append-only log — who published it, what it said, and when. Nothing here can be edited or deleted afterwards by anybody, including an administrator. For a Western Cape Government asset under concession, that is the difference between saying you are in control and being able to show it.
- The closure history loads from the operations database. Connect the environment variables and the full record appears here, newest first.