The City Hall dominates Pietermaritzburg's central business district like a Victorian-era exclamation mark. Built from red brick, it holds the distinction of being the largest red brick building in the Southern Hemisphere - a claim that sounds improbable until you stand beneath it and the sheer scale of the facade sinks in. Inside, a large pipe organ fills the hall with sound during occasional concerts, a remnant of the city's British colonial ambitions to replicate the culture they had left behind. Behind the City Hall, the Natal Society Library maintains a large children's wing, and the streets radiating outward display the kind of colonial-era architecture - gabled rooflines, ironwork balconies, wide verandas - that has made Pietermaritzburg famous for its built heritage. The city did not grow haphazardly. It was planned, in the grid-and-monument style of British imperial towns, to project permanence.

The Voortrekkers who founded Pietermaritzburg in the late 1830s had trekked hundreds of kilometers from the Cape Colony to escape British rule. The irony was not long in arriving. Their short-lived Boer republic, Natalia, lasted barely five years before Britain annexed the territory in 1843. Fort Napier, named after Sir George Thomas Napier, the Governor of the Cape Colony, was built to house a British garrison, and Pietermaritzburg became the administrative seat of the Natal Colony. That administrative role persists: the city remains the capital of KwaZulu-Natal, home to local, district, and provincial governments, making the public sector one of its largest employers. Aluminium smelting, timber processing, and dairy production round out the economy of a city that was built for governance and has never quite shaken the habit.

Every May, approximately 20,000 runners attempt one of the most grueling ultramarathons on Earth. The Comrades Marathon covers roughly 89 kilometers between Durban and Pietermaritzburg, alternating annually between the 'up run' - from Durban's sea level to Pietermaritzburg's inland elevation - and the 'down run' in the opposite direction. Neither direction is easy. The route climbs and descends through the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, passing sugar cane fields, indigenous bush, and small towns where spectators line the road from dawn. First run in 1921 to honor South African soldiers who died in World War I, the Comrades has grown into one of the world's oldest and largest ultramarathons. Runners have twelve hours to finish. Those who do not make the cutoff are stopped on the course, sometimes within sight of the finish line. The race is as much about the ones who do not finish as the ones who do.

Above the city, Queen Elizabeth Park spreads across the hills with zebra, buck, and other game roaming freely - no fences, no dangerous predators, just open parkland where you can walk without worry. The main hazard, locals will tell you, is the monkeys: vervet monkeys that have learned to associate humans with food and will steal a packed lunch with the efficiency of a professional pickpocket. The KwaZulu-Natal National Botanical Gardens in Mayor's Walk are worth a longer visit. Focused on indigenous flora, the gardens wind through forest and open ground, and on weekends a steady procession of wedding parties arrives to pose among the proteas and cycads. At the entrance, a restaurant and coffee shop provide a base for what the gardens quietly demand: an unhurried afternoon, the kind of time that a capital city devoted to government paperwork does not usually inspire.

Pietermaritzburg sits on the N3 freeway that connects Durban, fifty minutes to the east, with Johannesburg, six hundred kilometers to the northwest. It is the kind of city that travelers pass through on their way to somewhere else - the Drakensberg Mountains lie two hours to the west, the subtropical coast stretches south and north - and yet stopping here rewards those who do. Twenty minutes out of town, the Howick Falls plunge 95 meters into a gorge that the Zulu call KwaNogqaza, 'the Place of the Tall One.' Fireworks fill the Indian shops downtown during Diwali. Kwaito and house music pulse from nightclubs in the CBD while folk musicians play the Red Door on Tuesday nights. The minibus taxis that are the city's true public transit system career through streets where someone is always leaning from a window, shouting the destination: 'eTuwen! Town!'