The Most Beautiful Places in Northern Territory
8 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Northern Territory are Uluru, Kakadu National Park and Kings Canyon. The list covers 8 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The Northern Territory spans two very different worlds: the arid Red Centre around Alice Springs and the tropical Top End around Darwin, with its monsoon floods and escarpments. What unites them is age. These are some of the oldest exposed landscapes on Earth, worn down over hundreds of millions of years, and they are also the country of Aboriginal peoples whose connection to them stretches back tens of thousands of years, so rocks and gorges here carry stories as well as geology.
The Red Centre holds the most famous forms. Uluru, a single great mass of sandstone, rises from the flat desert and changes colour through the day; nearby Kata Tjuta's rounded domes share the same national park, listed by UNESCO for both its nature and its living Anangu culture. In Watarrka, Kings Canyon cuts sheer walls of red sandstone above a palm-filled gorge, and Tnorala, or Gosse Bluff, is a ring of hills left from an ancient impact crater. Further north, Karlu Karlu scatters huge rounded granite boulders across the plain, many balanced on one another.
The Top End brings water and art. Katherine Gorge in Nitmiluk National Park is a chain of gorges carved by the Katherine River through ancient sandstone, and at Ubirr in Kakadu, rock shelters hold paintings in the X-ray style, with the bones and organs of fish and animals drawn inside their outlines.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Uluru | Rock formation | |
| 2 | Kakadu National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 3 | Kings Canyon | Canyon | |
| 4 | Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 5 | Ubirr | Petroglyph | |
| 6 | Karlu Karlu / Devils Marbles Conservation Reserve | Rock formation | |
| 7 | Tnorala (Gosse Bluff) | Impact crater | |
| 8 | Katherine Gorge | Canyon |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 Karlu Karlu / Devils Marbles Conservation Reserve
Australia20.567° S 134.267° E
Iain Whyte ( Iainwhyte ) · CC BY-SA 2.5 Karlu Karlu, also known as the Devils Marbles, is a scatter of enormous granite boulders on the plains of the Northern Territory, many of them rounded into near-perfect spheres and eggs, some stacked on top of one another or balanced on narrow footings as if dropped from above.
Did you know? The Aboriginal name Karlu Karlu is usually translated as 'round boulders'.
More about Karlu Karlu / Devils Marbles Conservation Reserve →
07 Tnorala (Gosse Bluff)
Gosses Bluff crater
Australia23.821° S 132.308° E
TerryT2 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Tnorala, better known as Gosse Bluff, is a ring of ridges rising about 180 metres out of the flat country west of Alice Springs, roughly five kilometres across and almost perfectly circular.
Did you know? A detailed survey published in 1972, combining mapping with seismic, gravity and magnetic data, concluded that only an impact could explain the structure.
08 Katherine Gorge
Australia · 28.1 km from Katherine14.313° S 132.474° E
Reesa sc · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Katherine River has carved a chain of thirteen gorges through ancient sandstone east of the town of Katherine, in Australia's Northern Territory, and in the dry season the water lies still and dark between red cliffs, while in the wet season the rising river joins them into one.
Did you know? The name Nitmiluk comes from nitmi, the cicada song Nabilil is said to have heard while camping at a gorge entrance, and luk, meaning place.
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 Northern Territory?
- On our list, Uluru ranks first, followed by Kakadu National Park and Kings Canyon.
- Why is Uluru red?
- Uluru is made of arkose, a sandstone rich in feldspar. Iron minerals near the surface oxidise, rusting the outer layer red, while fresh rock beneath is grey.
- What is Tnorala (Gosse Bluff)?
- Tnorala is the eroded remnant of a crater formed when a comet or asteroid struck the area around 140 million years ago. The ring of hills seen today is the hardened core of the original, much larger structure.
- What is X-ray art?
- X-ray art is a style of Aboriginal rock painting, found in Arnhem Land and Kakadu, that shows the internal anatomy of animals and people, such as the backbone and organs, inside the body outline. Ubirr has some of its best-known examples.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Northern Territory?
- In our collection, the places in Northern Territory are most often canyons and gorges (2), rock formations (2), national parks (2) and impact craters (1).
- How many places are on this list in Northern Territory?
- The list covers 8 places.