The penguins of Boulders Beach

A beach of granite boulders with small coves of pale sand between them. Black-and-white penguins stand on the rocks and look out to sea. A few metres away, people lie in the sun.

This is Boulders Beach in Simon's Town, on False Bay south of Cape Town. The beach is part of Table Mountain National Park.

A colony from two pairs

For a long time there were no penguins here. In the early 1980s, two breeding pairs settled on this beach. They grew into a well-known penguin colony.

The count in June 2026 found 790 breeding pairs, about 2,528 birds. A year earlier there were 698 breeding pairs. That makes roughly one in twelve of South Africa's African penguins a Boulders penguin.

Visitors see the birds best from the boardwalks at Foxy Beach. The national park charges a daily conservation fee.

The penguin that brays like a donkey

The African penguin, Spheniscus demersus, is the only penguin that breeds in Africa. It lives only on the coasts of South Africa and Namibia. It used to be called the jackass penguin, because its call sounds like a braying donkey.

A species in deep trouble

Boulders Beach looks lively, but the African penguin is in serious decline. In 2008 South Africa still had around 27,000 breeding pairs; by the end of 2023 there were about 8,750. In October 2024 the IUCN listed the species as Critically Endangered, the last category before extinct in the wild.

The main reason is a lack of food. The penguins live mostly on sardines and anchovies, and there are too few of them where the birds hunt, also because fishing boats take the same shoals. Oil spills add to it. In the past, people collected the eggs and scraped the guano from the breeding islands. Both nearly wiped the species out once before.

The South African seabird foundation SANCCOB warns that the African penguin could be extinct in the wild by 2035. If you want to know more about the work for the penguins, start at SANCCOB.

A penguin from old glass

In Eswatini, the small country on South Africa's north-eastern border, is the glassworks Ngwenya Glass. It has been there since 1979. It makes African animals from glass, mouth-blown and only from recycled glass: old bottles and jars, melted down and shaped anew.

Together with Ngwenya Glass we make our Light Figures. One of them is a small penguin.

The penguin in a jar

We set it inside our Sun Jar, which we build by hand in our Fair Trade factory in Johannesburg. By day it charges in the sun; at night it glows warmly, with the glass penguin standing right in the light.

A souvenir from South Africa, inspired by the penguins of Boulders Beach. For everyone who has been there, and for everyone who simply loves penguins. More about the penguin in a jar

Sources: SANParks (Boulders Penguin Colony, brochure 2024, census June 2026), BirdLife South Africa, SANCCOB (2024), Ngwenya Glass.