A Walk Past Sandton's Landmark Buildings

The best way to understand Sandton Central is on foot, because its landmarks are closer together than the traffic makes them feel. Here is a short loop through the buildings and squares that define the precinct, in the order a walk would take them.

Sandton City

Start where the precinct started. Sandton City opened in 1973 and gave the area its first real centre, a large shopping, office and hotel complex that still anchors everything around it. It is the reason the node exists where it does, and it remains the busiest single address in Sandton.

Nelson Mandela Square

Attached to Sandton City is the precinct’s best-known public space. Formerly Sandton Square, it was renamed Nelson Mandela Square in 2004, when a large bronze statue of the former president was unveiled over the open plaza. The square is the precinct’s gathering point and its most photographed spot, ringed by restaurants and busy from lunch into the evening. It is the natural place to eat in Sandton on a first visit.

The Sandton Convention Centre

A short walk away is the Sandton Convention Centre, one of the largest conference venues in the country and a fixture on the business calendar. It has hosted major international summits, and when a big event is in town, this is usually where it lands.

The Leonardo

Finish by looking up. The Leonardo, completed in 2019 at roughly 234 metres, is the tallest building in Sandton, in South Africa and on the continent, a mixed-use tower of homes, offices and hospitality. It is the precinct’s exclamation mark and a preview of where the architecture is heading: tall, mixed-use, and as much a place to live as to work.

The station in the middle

Threading through all of it is the Gautrain Sandton station, which sits in the heart of the cluster and makes the whole loop reachable without a car. That is the quiet point of the walk: the landmarks are not scattered across a city, they are stacked into a few blocks you can cross on foot.