The Most Beautiful National Parks in Australia
7 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful national parks in Australia are Kakadu National Park, Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park and Blue Mountains National Park. The list covers 7 national parks. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Australia is the flattest and among the oldest continents, its rocks worn down over hundreds of millions of years with little mountain building to renew them. What remains are monoliths, ranges and gorges exposing some of the most ancient surfaces on the planet, from red desert in the centre to tropical rainforest in the far north. Many of these places are also bound up with Aboriginal culture going back tens of thousands of years.
Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park protects Uluṟu, a single great mass of arkose sandstone that glows red at sunset, and the domes of Kata Tjuṯa, both sacred to the Aṉangu. Karijini in the Pilbara cuts narrow gorges through banded iron formations some 2.5 billion years old. Purnululu in the Kimberley holds the Bungle Bungle Range, beehive domes striped orange and dark grey. Daintree National Park in Queensland protects lowland tropical rainforest that runs down to the sea at Cape Tribulation, beside the Great Barrier Reef.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kakadu National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 2 | Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 3 | Blue Mountains National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 4 | Karijini National Park | National park | |
| 5 | Lamington National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 6 | Purnululu National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 7 | Daintree National Park | National park |
01 Kakadu National Park
Australia13.005° S 132.520° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Squirrel_photos from Pixabay The park is also scarred by and wrapped around an industrial site: the Ranger uranium mine, enclaved within Kakadu, ceased operations in January 2021, while feral water buffalo, pigs and invasive weeds remain management problems. The Bowali Visitor Centre near Jabiru, the park's only town, is the place to start and to check which roads and sites are open.
02 Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park
Australia25.322° S 130.986° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay The park covers about 1,326 square kilometres and is listed by UNESCO for both its natural and its cultural values, as well as being a biosphere reserve. What looks like empty desert is a rich arid ecosystem: at least seven species of bat roost in the crevices of the rocks, 73 species of reptile have been recorded, and after the rare heavy rains waterfalls pour off the rock faces and frogs appear in the pools at their base. Walking trails such as the Liru, Mala and Kuniya walks lead around the base of Uluṟu, and dedicated viewing areas are laid out for sunrise and sunset over both formations.
Did you know? The surveyor William Gosse sighted Uluṟu on 19 July 1873 and named it Ayers Rock after Henry Ayers, then Chief Secretary of South Australia.
03 Blue Mountains National Park
Australia · 13.6 km from Katoomba33.615° S 150.418° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by anncapictures from Pixabay The park was gazetted in 1959, growing out of a campaign launched in 1932 by the bushwalker and conservationist Myles Dunphy, and in 2000 it became the central piece of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, recognised for its extraordinary range of eucalypts, around 13 per cent of all species in the world. Gullies of temperate rainforest shelter plants that descend from the flora of Gondwana, and the park supports rare animals such as the Blue Mountains water skink and the regent honeyeater. A network of historic walking tracks, many of them listed on the state heritage register, threads along the clifftops and down into the valleys.
Did you know? The region's bluish tint is usually attributed to a haze of oil droplets released by eucalyptus trees.
04 Karijini National Park
Australia22.251° S 117.976° E
Image by RuRu_SG from Pixabay The best months are the cooler dry season, roughly April to September; summer heat regularly passes 40°C. Some gorge walks require scrambling and swimming in cold water, and flash floods can follow rain.
Did you know? The gorge walls expose named rock units such as the Brockman Iron Formation, the Wittenoom Dolomite and the Mount McRae Shale.
05 Lamington National Park
Australia · 33.4 km from Gold Coast28.142° S 153.115° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Alan Wigginton · CC BY-SA 4.0 The park was declared in 1915 after a long campaign by local conservationists, above all Romeo Lahey, and named after Lord Lamington, governor of Queensland at the turn of the century. Lahey also laid out much of its track network during the Great Depression, famously keeping the gradients gentle; the Border Track still runs along the range between the old mountain lodges at Binna Burra and Green Mountains, where the O'Reilly family opened a guesthouse in 1926. In 1937 Bernard O'Reilly became a national hero when he walked alone into the wilderness and found two survivors of the airliner City of Brisbane, which had crashed in the ranges ten days earlier.
Did you know? Lamington holds the most northerly Antarctic beech cool temperate rainforest in Australia.
06 Purnululu National Park
Australia17.449° S 128.546° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 On foot, the landscape turns into a maze. From the Piccaninny car park a trail winds between the domes and down between two rock walls into Cathedral Gorge, a vast natural amphitheatre of red rock. Echidna Chasm, by contrast, is a soaring slot canyon, its walls pressing close overhead, and the gorges that dissect the plateau run 100 to 200 m deep. From the air the domes appear as an endless field of orange and black hives, which is how the world first saw them.
Did you know? North-east of Piccaninny Gorge lies the Piccaninny crater, a meteorite impact structure about seven kilometres across that is best seen from the air.
07 Daintree National Park
Australia · 34.4 km from Port Douglas16.300° S 145.200° E
Image by moremilu from Pixabay At Mossman Gorge, boardwalks and tracks lead through the forest to a clear river tumbling over boulders under the trees. North of the Daintree River, the road winds through rainforest towards Cape Tribulation, where short boardwalks cross mangroves and fan-palm groves and the forest ends abruptly on the sand.
Did you know? Botanists found the long-lost idiot fruit again after cattle died at Cow Bay and its huge seeds turned up in their stomachs.
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 national parks in Australia?
- On our list, Kakadu National Park ranks first, followed by Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park and Blue Mountains National Park.
- Why is the Bungle Bungle Range striped?
- The darker bands are layers of sandstone that hold more moisture and support cyanobacteria, while the orange bands are drier layers stained by iron and manganese oxides. The stripes follow the original sediment layers of the rock.
- What is Uluṟu made of?
- Uluṟu is made of arkose, a coarse sandstone rich in feldspar, laid down around 550 million years ago. Its red colour comes from iron in the rock oxidising at the surface; freshly broken rock is grey.
- How many national parks are on this list in Australia?
- The list covers 7 national parks.