If you want a bird’s-eye view of Johannesburg, the 50-storey Carlton Centre is the place to go. Visitors to the centre can enjoy a panoramic view of the City of Gold from the Top of Africa, as the topmost floor of the building is known: 360 degrees of dense cityscape and outwards towards the countryside and beyond. The tallest building in Africa and once the tallest building in the southern hemisphere, the Carlton Centre stands 223m high – about 40m shy of featuring on the world’s top 100 skyscrapers list. However, this feat of architecture makes the centre one of the must-see Johannesburg attractions. Construction was a lengthy process, beginning in 1967 and ending in 1974, although the centre officially opened in 1973.

Constitution Hill is a living museum that tells the story of South Africa’s journey to democracy. The site is a former prison and military fort that bears testament to South Africa’s turbulent past and, today, is home to the country’s Constitutional Court, which endorses the rights of all citizens. There is perhaps no other site of incarceration in South Africa that imprisoned the sheer number of world-renowned men and women as those held within the walls of Constitution Hill’s Old Fort, Women's Jail and Number Four. Nelson Mandela. Mahatma Gandhi. Joe Slovo. Albertina Sisulu. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Fatima Meer. They all served time here. But the precinct also confined tens of thousands of ordinary people during its 100-year history: men and women of all races, creeds, ages and political agendas; children too; the everyman and the elite. In this way, the history of every South African lives here.

The area that is currently the Central Business District has been the central area of Johannesburg nearly since its inception. Its central location in the city, as well as careful planning, led to it to be chosen as the best location for residential and commercial development, especially during the economically prosperous 1960s and 1970s. Many large commercial products were completed in this period, such as the Carlton Centre, which is still the tallest building in Africa. Under apartheid, the Central Business District was classified as a whites-only area, meaning that black people were allowed to work and shop there but could not live there. Application of the Group Areas Act became very lax in the 1980s, among other things because courts were not able to handle all the cases, and when the Act was abolished even more disadvantaged black people moved into the City Centre, often taking over whole buildings by overfilling them with people that the previous middle-class white tenants found unacceptable neighbours.