On our City Cycle Tour through Cape Town, we combine the old and the new of Cape Town’s urban landscape, with visits to the Bo-Kaap, Company Gardens through Adderley Street to Green Point and get to sample indigenous fruit – Carpobrotus edulis commonly known as the sour fig!
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On the market in St. George’s Mall, our guide stops for us to taste the Sour Fig, which grows in South Africa on coastal and inland slopes from Northern Cape through Western to Eastern Cape. The sour fig’s ripe fruit are gathered and either eaten fresh or made into a very tart jam. The fruits have a strong, salty and sour taste. Seed production with hundreds of seeds produced in each fruit is high. Fruit of sour fig is fleshy and seeds are embedded in the sweet, sticky and jelly-like mucilage.
The sour fig has been used for medicinal purposes for many years by indigenous people who can use it to treat tuberculosis, diarrhoea, dysentery or as a laxative. Additionally you can treat infections in the mouth with the sour fig. Alternatively you can squeeze the juice of the leaf onto a sunburnt area or apply it to bruises, scrapes, cuts and gazes.
The Green Point Urban Park includes a biodiversity showcase garden where you can see how the sour fig grows and how the plant looks like. Furthermore, there are many other plants you can discover and read information about them.
Join our City Cycle Tour and learn about Nature, Culture and People in Cape Town while you discover all this from your bicycle seat.
Written Anna Plump