The Leonardo rises at 75 Maude Street, barely a hundred metres from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the beating heart of South African finance. It cost about two billion rand to build and stacks fifty-five floors of mixed use into a single tower: street-level shops, eleven floors of offices, and roughly two hundred apartments above. The headline number belonged to the penthouse. The three-storey, 2,100-square-metre apartment at the summit was put on the market for 180 million rand, a price that would have made it the most expensive sectional-title home ever sold in the country. The building was conceived as a vertical resort as much as an address, with a podium garden, a swimming pool and a restaurant open to the public.

Getting the Leonardo built took longer than anyone first imagined. It was announced years before a foundation was poured, under a different design and a different architect, with an optimistic completion date that came and went. Construction finally began on 17 November 2015. Floor by floor the tower rose through the Sandton skyline. By 2018 it had passed the Sandton City office tower, the previous local champion at 141 metres, and in April 2019 it topped out as the tallest building on the continent. Local architects carried the project to completion, and the structure was finished at the end of 2019, a homegrown achievement in a city that had not built anything so tall in a generation.

Sandton was farmland within living memory. As central Johannesburg emptied in the late twentieth century, the banks, brokerages and corporate headquarters migrated north to this new district, and Sandton became the place where South African money concentrated. The Leonardo is the exclamation point on that story, the tallest expression of a financial capital that grew up around a stock exchange rather than a harbour or a seat of government. Stand at its base among the boutiques and the bankers and it is easy to forget that all of this wealth, the towers and the share prices and the 180-million-rand penthouse, traces back to the gold reef discovered in the dust a few kilometres south, less than a century and a half ago.

Africa's tallest towers now cluster in the north: the Iconic Tower in Egypt's New Administrative Capital soars to nearly 394 metres, and Morocco's Mohammed VI Tower reaches 250. The Leonardo sits comfortably behind them on the continental list, yet it stands alone south of the Sahara. No building in the vast stretch of Africa below the great desert rises higher. For a city that invented itself overnight on a gold strike and has reinvented itself many times since, that distinction feels apt. Johannesburg has always reached upward, and from the top of the Leonardo, on a clear Highveld morning, you can watch its sprawl run all the way to the curve of the earth.