The Most Beautiful Islands in Oceania
13 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful islands in Oceania are Great Barrier Reef (Australia), Moorea (French Polynesia) and Kangaroo Island (Australia). The list covers 13 islands in 5 countries. Australia has the most, with 7. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The Pacific is the great laboratory of islands. Volcanoes rise from the sea floor, coral grows around their shores, and as the old volcanoes slowly sink the reefs keep building upward, leaving a ring of reef around a lagoon and finally an atoll with no mountain at all. Oceania shows every stage of that process, from jagged volcanic peaks to almost-atolls and the largest reef system on Earth, alongside islands raised by people themselves.
The Great Barrier Reef stretches for some 2,300 kilometres off Queensland as thousands of separate reefs and hundreds of islands and cays. In French Polynesia, Moorea is a deeply eroded volcano cut by two bays, Bora Bora gathers its lagoon and barrier reef around the dark peak of Mount Otemanu, and little Maupiti shows the same form on a quieter scale. Aitutaki in the Cook Islands is an almost-atoll whose triangular lagoon is fringed by small coral islets.
Other islands are wilder or older in a human sense. Lord Howe Island, a crescent of volcanic peaks in the Tasman Sea, shelters the southernmost coral reef in the world. Whakaari / White Island is the most active volcano in New Zealand, a steaming crater ringed by sulphur vents. Nan Madol, off Pohnpei in Micronesia, is a ruined city built on artificial islets of stacked basalt columns, and Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia is a fringing reef so close to shore that whale sharks feed within sight of the beach.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Great Barrier Reef | Coral reef | Australia | ✓ |
| 2 | Moorea | Island | French Polynesia | |
| 3 | Kangaroo Island | Island | Australia | |
| 4 | K'gari | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 5 | Lord Howe Island | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 6 | Whakaari / White Island | Island | New Zealand | |
| 7 | Aitutaki | Island | Cook Islands | |
| 8 | Nan Madol | Ruins | Federated States of Micronesia | ✓ |
| 9 | Bora Bora | Island | French Polynesia | |
| 10 | Christmas Island | Island | Australia | |
| 11 | Ningaloo Reef | Coral reef | Australia | ✓ |
| 12 | Maupiti | Island | French Polynesia | |
| 13 | Macquarie Island | Island | Australia | ✓ |
01 Great Barrier Reef
Australia · 37.6 km from Port Douglas16.400° S 145.800° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by alicia3690 from Pixabay That scale hasn't made it immune to stress. When water gets unusually warm, corals expel the colorful algae living in their tissue and turn ghostly white — a process called bleaching that isn't always fatal on its own, but leaves coral weakened and vulnerable if the heat doesn't ease up. The reef has been through documented mass bleaching events in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2025, and researchers estimate roughly half of its shallow-water coral cover has been lost since 2016 alone — a fact worth knowing before you go, not instead of going.
Did you know? The reef got its name from Matthew Flinders, who charted it in far greater detail in 1802.
02 Moorea
French Polynesia · 26.6 km from Papeete17.535° S 149.835° W
Image by Michelle-Maria from Pixabay The north coast is cut by two deep bays, Cook's Bay and Opunohu Bay, separated by the sharp mass of Mount Rotui. They are among the most beautiful anchorages in the South Pacific: steep green walls drop to calm water, and the peaks are reflected on still mornings. The irony of their names is that James Cook anchored not in the bay that bears his name, but in neighbouring Opunohu, in 1777. The classic view is from the Belvédère lookout on the slopes above, where both bays open out on either side of Rotui. Inland, the valleys are planted with pineapples and vanilla, the island's traditional crops.
Did you know? The name Moʻorea means 'yellow lizard' in Tahitian; earlier Europeans knew the island as Aimeo or Eimeo.
03 Kangaroo Island
Australia35.800° S 137.300° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay The western end belongs to Flinders Chase National Park, where the island's most famous sights stand on the edge of the Southern Ocean. The Remarkable Rocks are a cluster of huge granite boulders perched on a dome above the sea, hollowed and sculpted by wind, salt spray and rain and splashed with orange lichen. Nearby, at Cape du Couedic, Admirals Arch is a natural rock bridge hung with stalactites, where fur seals haul out on the ledges below. Beneath the southern and western coasts runs a network of limestone caves formed from ancient dune sands, and the north coast is lined with quiet sheltered bays.
Did you know? Matthew Flinders named the island in March 1802 after the kangaroos his crew hunted for fresh meat.
04 K'gari
Australia · 31.6 km from Hervey Bay25.240° S 153.150° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Poidabro · CC BY-SA 4.0 What astonishes visitors is that a heap of sand can hold rainforest. Tall forests grow in its interior, sustained by fungi in the soil that let plants draw nutrients from nothing but sand, fed by spring-fed creeks that run through most of the island's valleys. The island has more than a hundred freshwater lakes, including some forty perched lakes — lakes held above the water table on a hardened layer of sand and plant matter, about half of all such lakes known on Earth.
05 Lord Howe Island
Australia31.550° S 159.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
EmGer7 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The island was first sighted by Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball in February 1788 and it stayed uninhabited until 1834, when a whaling ship left three men to set up a supply station. Its isolation produced a remarkable roll of endemic life: the Lord Howe woodhen, a ground-dwelling bird found nowhere else; the kentia palm, Howea forsteriana; and the Lord Howe Island stick insect. The only wild population of that insect was found on Ball's Pyramid, a jagged volcanic spire 551 m tall that stands alone in the sea about 23 km to the southeast — one of the most dramatic rocks in any ocean.
Did you know? The island is the eroded stump of a shield volcano about seven million years old, and it is expected to disappear beneath the sea within some 200,000 years.
06 Whakaari / White Island
New Zealand37.520° S 177.183° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay On 9 December 2019, a short, violent eruption sent an ash column roughly 3.7 kilometres into the sky while 47 tourists and guides were on the crater floor, most of them day-trippers from cruise ships docked at nearby Tauranga and Whakatāne. Twenty-two people died and dozens more suffered severe burns; the disaster led to a landmark WorkSafe prosecution in New Zealand, with several tour operators and a scientific monitoring agency held to account for the risk they exposed visitors to on an active vent with no reliable warning system.
Did you know? The volcano has been built over roughly the past 150,000 years from two overlapping cones, named Ngatoro and Central.
07 Aitutaki
Cook Islands18.850° S 159.790° W
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay The lagoon cruise is the reason to come. Boats run across to Tapuaetai, better known as One Foot Island, in the southeast of the lagoon, where a sandbar stretches out at low tide and the views across the shallows are the best on the atoll. It is the most popular trip on the island, and other motu along the eastern rim, such as Akaiami and Tekopua, are visited on the same cruises. Akaiami has its own story: in the 1950s TEAL flying boats on the famous Coral Route landed in the lagoon and passengers rested on the islet while the planes refuelled; the old jetty still stands.
Did you know? Basalt adze heads found on the island were traced to quarries in Samoa and the Society Islands, evidence of long-distance Polynesian voyaging.
08 Nan Madol
Federated States of Micronesia · 21.8 km from Palikir6.842° N 158.332° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Uhooep · CC BY-SA 4.0 People were active here from around the first or second century AD. Islet building had begun by the eighth or ninth century, and the monumental basalt architecture dates from about 1180–1200. The stone was brought from a volcanic plug on the far side of the island. The complex had two parts: Madol Powe, the northeastern sector of 58 islets reserved for priests and the dead, and an administrative quarter where the nobility lived. 5 metres high enclose a central tomb built for the first Saudeleur ruler. Other islets had practical roles: one for building canoes, another for preparing coconut oil. With no fresh water or farmland on the islets, everything had to be ferried in from Pohnpei.
Did you know? Despite its size, the city probably never had more than about a thousand residents, and perhaps fewer than five hundred.
09 Bora Bora
Bora-Bora
French Polynesia16.498° S 151.736° W
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay The best of Bora Bora is the relationship between these elements, and the island rewards looking at it from several angles. From the motu the whole of Otemanu stands up across the water; from a boat inside the lagoon the colour of the water changes with every metre of depth; from the air, on the approach to the airport, the island reads like a diagram of how an atoll is born, with the old volcano in the middle and the reef already marking the outline it will one day become. The main village, Vaitape, sits on the west coast of the main island, and on the old Polynesian land there are ceremonial platforms, marae, of the more than forty once recorded, 13 survive.
Did you know? James Cook sighted the island on 29 July 1769, guided by the Tahitian navigator and priest Tupaia, who sailed with his expedition.
10 Christmas Island
Australia10.490° S 105.627° E
ChrisBrayPhotography · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes the island famous is the red crab. Tens of millions of these bright scarlet land crabs live in the forest, and at the start of the wet season, usually in October or November, they leave it almost at once and march to the sea to breed. The females release their eggs into the surf at the turn of the high tide in the last quarter of the moon, so the timing of the migration can be predicted with some precision. For a few weeks roads, gardens and beaches turn red; islanders close roads, put up barriers that steer the crabs into underpasses, and have built a five-metre crab bridge over Murray Road. Weeks later the tiny juveniles come back out of the sea in their own mass march.
11 Ningaloo Reef
Australia22.739° S 113.628° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The reef is famous above all for its big visitors. From around March to August, whale sharks — the largest fish in the sea — gather along the outer reef, and Ningaloo is one of the most reliable places on earth to swim beside them. In winter the same waters become a migration route for humpback whales, manta rays, dolphins and dugongs. Within the reef itself live some 500 species of fish, around 300 of coral and some 600 of molluscs.
Did you know? Novelist Tim Winton donated his A$25,000 Western Australian Premier's Book Award prize in 2002 to the campaign against a resort planned at Mauds Landing.
12 Maupiti
French Polynesia16.417° S 152.250° W
Image by palinska from Pixabay The single navigable gap in the reef, the Onoiau pass, is narrow and known for powerful currents, and that difficulty of access has shaped the island's character. Maupiti has around 1,300 inhabitants, its economy rests largely on noni fruit, and visitors stay in family-run guesthouses rather than large resorts. The island is easily explored on foot or by bicycle; the climb to the summit of Teurafaatiu, or to the rock of Hotu Paraoa, gives a full circle of lagoon, motu and open ocean, while Tereia beach on the main island is the classic place to swim in the lagoon. Inside the lagoon, manta rays gather at a cleaning station where they can be watched by snorkellers.
Did you know? The lagoon covers roughly 27 square kilometres, more than twice the area of the island it surrounds.
13 Macquarie Island
Australia54.630° S 158.860° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
L. R. Blake (d. 1918) · Public domain The island is long and narrow, about 35 km by 5 km, and lies roughly halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica, some 1,500 km southeast of Tasmania. Its beaches carry one of the great wildlife gatherings of the Southern Ocean. The entire world population of royal penguins comes here to breed. More than 80,000 southern elephant seals haul out on its shores, and about three and a half million seabirds of thirteen species breed here, several kinds of penguin among them.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful islands in Oceania?
- On our list, Great Barrier Reef (Australia) ranks first, followed by Moorea (French Polynesia) and Kangaroo Island (Australia).
- Which country has the most islands in Oceania?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (7), French Polynesia (3) and the Cook Islands (1).
- How do atolls form?
- An atoll begins as a fringing reef around a volcanic island. As the volcano slowly subsides, the coral keeps growing upward, first as a barrier reef around a lagoon and finally as a ring of reef islands with the volcano gone below the sea. Charles Darwin first proposed this explanation.
- How big is the Great Barrier Reef?
- It is the largest coral reef system in the world, extending about 2,300 kilometres along the coast of Queensland and made up of nearly 3,000 individual reefs and around 900 islands.
- Who built Nan Madol?
- Nan Madol was the ceremonial and political centre of the Saudeleur dynasty, which ruled Pohnpei for several centuries. Its walls were built of naturally formed basalt columns stacked crosswise on nearly a hundred artificial islets in a coastal lagoon.
- How many islands are on this list in Oceania?
- The list covers 13 islands in 5 countries. Australia has the most, with 7.