Johannesburg, South Africa

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA | "Egoli — The City of Gold"

Johannesburg is the most dynamic city in Africa — a sprawling, high-altitude metropolis of six million people built on the gold reefs of the Witwatersrand, where the world's largest urban forest of jacaranda and eucalyptus trees rises above a skyline that has been rebuilt three times since the first reef was struck in 1886. The city sits at 1,753 meters above sea level on the Highveld plateau, which gives it a quality of light unlike any other African city: thin, brilliant, and at dawn a palette of deep amber and rose gold that illuminates the towers of Sandton and the hills of Soweto simultaneously. Jo'burg is not a city of monuments or museums in the conventional sense — it is a city of neighborhoods, each one a distinct cultural archive of the forces that shaped modern South Africa, from the apartheid-era geometry of Soweto to the post-liberation creative economy of Maboneng and the concentrated wealth corridor of Sandton.

The colors are specific and extraordinary: the amber and rose gold of the Highveld dawn light, the deep green of the world's largest urban forest, the warm terracotta of Soweto's brick houses, and the blue-white of the summer thunderstorm sky that arrives over the plateau every afternoon in January — a palette that exists nowhere else on the African continent and that changes entirely between the dry winter months and the electrically charged wet season.