The hotel is not only a tribute to its setting, but which also sets its own standards of international service, cuisine and luxury. The Table Bay Hotel is magnificent, straddling the antique breakwater with a style that is both innovative, evocative and entirely in keeping with its surroundings. It is a contemporary architectural treasure, its design and execution the result of transcontinental co-operation. The rooms face either over the bay to Robben Island, prison home of South Africa's President Nelson Mandela for the greatest part of his 27 years of political incarceration, or across the harbour and the city, to Table Mountain.