The Most Beautiful Places in Australia
55 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Australia are The Twelve Apostles, Uluru and Sydney Opera House. The list covers 55 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Australia is an old continent, worn low over hundreds of millions of years and long isolated from the rest of the world. That age shows in red monoliths and sandstone gorges eroded from ancient sediments, in limestone coasts carved by the Southern Ocean, and in the coral of the tropical north. It is also a land of the world's oldest continuous living cultures, for whom many of these places are sacred, alongside the cities built since the eighteenth century.
Uluru rises abruptly from the plains of the Red Centre, a sandstone monolith of deep significance to the Anangu people, and to the north Kings Canyon cuts sheer walls into the same desert. Off the Queensland coast the Great Barrier Reef stretches for more than 2,000 kilometres, the largest coral reef system on Earth. On the Victorian coast, the limestone stacks of the Twelve Apostles stand in the surf, and in the Blue Mountains the sandstone pillars of the Three Sisters rise above eucalyptus forest.
The variety goes further. Cradle Mountain in Tasmania lifts jagged dolerite peaks over Dove Lake, the Jenolan Caves hold a labyrinth of decorated limestone chambers, and Blue Lake in Mount Gambier fills a volcanic crater with water that turns vivid blue each summer. Sydney adds its own landmarks: Jørn Utzon's Opera House with its white shells on Bennelong Point, the steel arch of the Harbour Bridge, the Romanesque Revival Queen Victoria Building of the 1890s, and the grinning face at the gate of Luna Park.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Twelve Apostles | Stack | |
| 2 | Uluru | Rock formation | |
| 3 | Sydney Opera House | Opera house | ✓ |
| 4 | Whitehaven Beach | Beach | |
| 5 | Cradle Mountain | Mountain | |
| 6 | Lake Hillier | Lake | |
| 7 | Karijini National Park | National park | |
| 8 | Great Barrier Reef | Coral reef | ✓ |
| 9 | Kakadu National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 10 | Queen Victoria Building | Covered passageway | |
| 11 | Three Sisters (Blue Mountains) | Rock formation | |
| 12 | Jenolan Caves | Cave | |
| 13 | Kangaroo Island | Island | |
| 14 | K'gari | Island | ✓ |
| 15 | Blue Lake (Warwar) | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 16 | Kings Canyon | Canyon | |
| 17 | Luna Park | Amusement park | |
| 18 | Sydney Harbour Bridge | Bridge | |
| 19 | Lord Howe Island | Island | ✓ |
| 20 | Bay of Fires | Beach | |
| 21 | Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre | Salt flat | |
| 22 | Christmas Island | Island | |
| 23 | Taronga Zoo | Zoo | |
| 24 | Wolfe Creek Crater | Impact crater | |
| 25 | Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 26 | Parkes Observatory | Radio telescope | |
| 27 | State Library Victoria | Library building | |
| 28 | Ubirr | Petroglyph | |
| 29 | Blue Mountains National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 30 | Ball's Pyramid | Stack | ✓ |
01 The Twelve Apostles
Australia38.641° S 143.049° E
Leonard Koh · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Twelve Apostles are a scatter of limestone stacks standing in the surf of the Southern Ocean off the coast of Port Campbell National Park, in south-western Victoria.
Did you know? The waters below are protected by the Twelve Apostles Marine National Park, about 7,500 hectares along some 17 km of coast, where weedy seadragons shelter in kelp forests.
02 Uluru
Australia25.345° S 131.036° E
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay 4 km around its base. That makes it one of the most recognisable landforms on the continent. Geologists call it an inselberg: an isolated remnant that outlasted the rock around it because it has almost no joints or bedding partings for erosion to exploit.
Did you know? In Pitjantjatjara, Uluṟu is a proper name with no other meaning, though senior traditional owners also use it as a family name.
03 Sydney Opera House
Australia · 1.6 km from Sydney33.857° S 151.215° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
No machine-readable author provided. Roybb95~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY-SA 3.0 Utzon won the 1957 competition with something closer to a gesture than a blueprint — a few sketched curves and a confident hand, no structural drawings, nothing that told engineers how the shapes would actually stand up.
Did you know? The building stands on 588 concrete piers driven as deep as 25 metres below sea level.
04 Whitehaven Beach
Australia20.283° S 149.035° E
DANIEL JULIE from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0 Whitehaven Beach runs for some seven kilometres along the eastern shore of Whitsunday Island, the largest of the Whitsunday group off the Queensland coast, inside Whitsunday Islands National Park.
Did you know? The Ngaro people lived on these islands for around 8,000 years, and in 1861 they besieged a European logging camp on Whitsunday Island for two weeks.
05 Cradle Mountain
Australia41.685° S 145.951° E
Bjørn Christian Tørrissen · CC BY-SA 3.0 Cradle Mountain is the emblem of the Tasmanian highlands: a jagged wall of dark columns standing above Dove Lake, its four summits notched like the rim of a crown. The highest point reaches 1,545 m, with Smithies Peak, Weindorfers Tower and Little Horn following along the ridge.
Did you know? At 1,545 metres it is only the sixth-highest mountain in Tasmania, despite being the island's most famous peak.
06 Lake Hillier
Australia34.096° S 123.203° E
Aussie Oc · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lake Hillier's pink is not a bloom that comes and goes — it's a stable, resident ecosystem.
Did you know? A member of Flinders's party reported salt crystallised so thickly along the shore that it could have filled a ship's hold.
07 Karijini National Park
Australia22.251° S 117.976° E
Image by RuRu_SG from Pixabay Karijini National Park, in the Pilbara of Western Australia, is a plateau of red iron-rich rock and gold spinifex that hides an underworld of gorges. On top the country is flat and hot; then the ground opens, and narrow chasms drop through layer upon layer of banded rock to green pools, ferns and waterfalls.
Did you know? Five gorges, Hancock, Joffre, Knox, Red and Weano, converge at the heart of the park.
08 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 At around 344,400 square kilometers and roughly 2,300 km long, the Great Barrier Reef isn't one reef so much as some 3,000 individual reefs and hundreds of islands strung together — a footprint about the size of Italy or Japan, and by most measures the largest living structure ever built by living organisms, coral…
Did you know? In places the reef lies up to 160 kilometres from the mainland, across a channel more than 60 metres deep.
09 Kakadu National Park
Australia13.005° S 132.520° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Squirrel_photos from Pixabay Kakadu, in the Top End of Australia's Northern Territory, is the country's largest national park after one desert reserve: about 19,800 square kilometres, roughly the size of Wales, running from tidal rivers on the coast to the sheer sandstone wall of the Arnhem Land escarpment.
10 Queen Victoria Building
Australia · 0.5 km from Sydney33.872° S 151.207° E
Original: Dietmar Rabich ( Derivative work: Democfest ) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Queen Victoria Building fills an entire city block in the heart of Sydney, between George, York, Market and Druitt streets: a stone palace some 190 m long and 30 m wide, crowned by a great central copper dome and twenty smaller ones along its roofline.
Did you know? The youth holding a torch in the York Street sculpture group, the Genius of Civilisation, is said to have been modelled on the swimmer Percy Cavill.
11 Three Sisters (Blue Mountains)
Three Sisters
Australia · 3.2 km from Katoomba33.736° S 150.314° E
Image by anncapictures from Pixabay Three sandstone pillars stand on the edge of the Jamison Valley at Katoomba, stepping down one after another from the cliff into a sea of eucalyptus forest. The Three Sisters — named Meehni, Wimlah and Gunnedoo, rising to 922, 918 and 906 metres — are the best-known sight of the Blue Mountains.
Did you know? Between 1879 and 1925 the cliffs below were mined for coal and shale, served by flying foxes and cable tramways.
12 Jenolan Caves
Australia · 30.4 km from Katoomba33.821° S 150.021° E
GrahamWitt · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Jenolan Caves sit in a steep limestone valley on the western side of the Blue Mountains, inside the Jenolan Karst Conservation Reserve.
Did you know? The caves were reserved in 1866, six years before Yellowstone became the world's first national park.
13 Kangaroo Island
Australia35.800° S 137.300° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay Kangaroo Island is Australia's third-largest island, a 145-kilometre slab of farmland, scrub and wild coast lying off the tip of the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.
Did you know? The Remarkable Rocks are granite boulders shaped over millions of years by wind, spray and rain.
14 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 K'gari, known for a century and a half as Fraser Island, is the largest sand island in the world: some 123 km of dunes, forest and lakes off the coast of Queensland, built up over roughly 750,000 years from sand carried north by coastal currents onto a volcanic bedrock base.
15 Blue Lake (Warwar)
Blue Lake
Australia · 2.1 km from Mount Gambier37.847° S 140.778° E
Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 Blue Lake / Warwar fills a volcanic crater on the edge of Mount Gambier, in South Australia's Limestone Coast, and for part of every year it is one of the most startling colours in the Australian landscape.
Did you know? The lake's surface lies about 17 metres below the level of Mount Gambier's main street.
16 Kings Canyon
Australia24.258° S 131.563° E
Image by walesjacqueline from Pixabay Kings Canyon is a deep cleft cut into the sandstone of Central Australia, and its walls are the reason people come: sheer faces of red and ochre sandstone rising more than 100 metres above the creek bed.
Did you know? Kings Canyon lies at the western end of the George Gill Range, a long sandstone ridge rising from the desert plain.
17 Luna Park
Australia · 2.7 km from Sydney33.848° S 151.210° E
Adam.J.W.C. · CC BY 3.0 Luna Park Sydney sits on the northern shore of Sydney Harbour at Milsons Point, directly beneath the Harbour Bridge. It opened on 4 October 1935, built largely from rides and equipment shipped from Luna Park Glenelg in Adelaide by a group of showmen including Herman Phillips.
Did you know? In 1959 the entire park served as a film set for Leslie Norman's screen adaptation of the play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.
18 Sydney Harbour Bridge
Australia · 2.1 km from Sydney33.852° S 151.211° E
Image by LM07 from Pixabay Sydney Harbour is deep enough that no one could sink temporary piers out into the water to support the arch while it was being built.
Did you know? The summit of the arch stands 134 metres above sea level, and the arch itself spans 504 metres between its bearings.
19 Lord Howe Island
Australia31.550° S 159.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
EmGer7 · CC BY-SA 3.0 Lord Howe Island is a crescent of land in the Tasman Sea, about ten kilometres long and in places barely three hundred metres wide, lying some 600 km east of Port Macquarie on the Australian coast.
Did you know? The flightless Lord Howe woodhen fell to fewer than 30 birds in the 1970s; after captive breeding and rat eradication, a 2023 survey counted about 1,100.
20 Bay of Fires
Australia41.137° S 148.308° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Bay of Fires runs for about 50 kilometres along the north-east coast of Tasmania, from Binalong Bay in the south to Eddystone Point in the north. It is a coast of three colours.
Did you know? Abel Tasman sighted Eddystone Point in December 1642 but was beaten back by westerly gales when he tried to round it.
21 Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre
Australia28.667° S 137.167° E
Stephan Ridgway · CC BY 2.0 Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre is Australia's largest lake and also its lowest point, sitting about 15 meters below sea level — yet for most of any given decade it is not a lake at all, just a blinding white salt pan.
Did you know? The deepest recorded flood, about 6 metres, came in 1974, when observers reported the water as blue as the ocean.
22 Christmas Island
Australia10.490° S 105.627° E
ChrisBrayPhotography · CC BY-SA 4.0 Christmas Island is the tip of an extinct volcano that climbs more than 4,500 metres from the floor of the Indian Ocean, capped with limestone laid down by ancient coral. Sheer cliffs ring a raised plateau whose highest point, Murray Hill, reaches 361 metres.
23 Taronga Zoo
Australia · 4.1 km from Sydney33.843° S 151.241° E
istolethetv · CC BY 2.0 Taronga Zoo occupies one of the most enviable pieces of land in Sydney: a steep, wooded slope on the northern shore of the harbour at Mosman, looking straight across the water to the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and the towers of the city.
Did you know? Sydney's first public zoo opened in 1884 at Billy Goat Swamp in Moore Park, on ground now occupied by Sydney Boys and Sydney Girls High Schools.
24 Wolfe Creek Crater
Australia19.172° S 127.796° E
Whinqinq Pom · CC BY-SA 2.0 At 880 meters across and almost perfectly circular, Wolfe Creek is one of the best-preserved impact craters anywhere on Earth — the kind of clean, textbook bowl shape that mostly survives only in places dry and geologically quiet enough not to erode it away.
Did you know? From the rim down to today's sandy floor the crater is about 60 metres deep.
25 Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park
Australia25.322° S 130.986° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay Few landscapes are as instantly recognisable as the one protected here: a single sandstone mass rising out of red sand plains in the centre of Australia, and, to the west, a cluster of great rounded domes.
Did you know? In 1993 Uluṟu became the first officially dual-named feature in the Northern Territory, and in 2002 the order was reversed to put the Aboriginal name first.
26 Parkes Observatory
Australia · 17 km from Parkes32.998° S 148.263° E
Diceman Stephen West · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Parkes radio telescope rises from the open farmland of central New South Wales, a 64-metre dish that tilts and turns to follow the sky.
Did you know? For the Apollo missions an 18-metre companion dish on rails, moved by a tractor engine, sent the uplink signals, because the great dish can only receive.
27 State Library Victoria
Australia · 1.2 km from Melbourne37.810° S 144.965° E
Image by 12019 from Pixabay State Library Victoria is one of the grand public buildings of nineteenth-century Melbourne, and its heart is a single breathtaking room. 75 metres wide and just as high, with an oculus almost five metres across letting daylight fall onto desks for some 320 readers.
Did you know? The domed reading room was originally planned to hold more than a million books and up to 600 readers at once.
28 Ubirr
Australia12.409° S 132.959° E
Martin Kraft · CC BY-SA 3.0 Ubirr is a cluster of sandstone outcrops on the northeastern edge of Kakadu National Park, where shallow overhangs facing the Nadab floodplain have served for millennia as both shelter and canvas.
Did you know? Mimi spirits are said to be so thin that they can slip in and out of cracks in the rock, which is why they are painted as stick-slender figures.
29 Blue Mountains National Park
Australia · 13.6 km from Katoomba33.615° S 150.418° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by anncapictures from Pixabay Barely a couple of hours inland from Sydney, the land rises into a sandstone plateau cut by gorges so deep and sheer that early colonists took a quarter of a century to find a way across.
Did you know? The highest point in the park, Mount Werong, rises to 1,215 m above sea level.
30 Ball's Pyramid
Australia31.754° S 159.252° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
PotMart186 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ball's Pyramid is the eroded core of a volcano standing alone in the Tasman Sea, a blade of dark basalt that rises 572 metres straight out of the water yet is only about 300 metres wide at its base.
Did you know? The giant stick insects vanished from Lord Howe Island after the supply ship Makambo ran aground in 1918 and let black rats ashore.
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 places in Australia?
- On our list, The Twelve Apostles ranks first, followed by Uluru and Sydney Opera House.
- Why is Uluru red?
- Uluru is made of arkose, a sandstone rich in feldspar. Iron minerals near the surface oxidise, essentially rusting, which gives the rock its red colour; fresh rock beneath is grey.
- Are there still twelve Twelve Apostles?
- There never were twelve: the group had nine stacks when it was named, and one collapsed in 2005. The limestone continues to erode, while new stacks slowly form from the cliffs.
- Why does the Blue Lake in Mount Gambier change colour?
- In late spring the lake shifts from grey-blue to an intense cobalt. As the water warms, tiny calcite crystals form and scatter blue light, and the effect fades again in autumn.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Australia?
- In our collection, the places in Australia are most often islands (7), national parks (7), rock formations (6) and nature sanctuaries (6).
- How many places are on this list in Australia?
- The list covers 55 places.