The Most Beautiful Places in Oceania
105 places in 9 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Oceania are Milford Sound / Piopiotahi (New Zealand), Bora Bora (French Polynesia) and Uluru (Australia). The list covers 105 places in 9 countries. Australia has the most, with 55. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Oceania's beauty comes from isolation. Australia drifted alone for tens of millions of years, worn down into one of the flattest and oldest landscapes on Earth, while New Zealand sits on an active plate boundary where the Southern Alps are still rising and glaciers flow almost to the sea. Around them, coral reefs, volcanic islands and lagoons scatter across the Pacific. Aboriginal and Māori traditions give many of these landforms names and stories far older than any map.
In the red centre of Australia, Uluru rises as a single mass of sandstone, sacred to the Anangu people and changing colour with the light. The Great Barrier Reef stretches for more than 2,300 kilometres along the Queensland coast as the largest coral reef system in the world. On the Great Ocean Road, the limestone stacks of the Twelve Apostles stand in the surf, and in the Blue Mountains the Three Sisters rise above a sea of eucalyptus. Tasmania adds Cradle Mountain above Dove Lake, and the Jenolan Caves are among the oldest known open caves on Earth.
New Zealand answers with ice and rock. Aoraki / Mount Cook is the country's highest peak, Franz Josef Glacier descends from the Southern Alps into temperate rainforest, and in Fiordland National Park, Milford Sound cuts deep between sheer walls and waterfalls. Sydney adds two very different landmarks: Jørn Utzon's Opera House with its shell-like roofs, and the Romanesque arcades of the Queen Victoria Building.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Milford Sound / Piopiotahi | Fjord | New Zealand | |
| 2 | Bora Bora | Island | French Polynesia | |
| 3 | Uluru | Rock formation | Australia | |
| 4 | Rock Islands Southern Lagoon | Lagoon | Palau | |
| 5 | Aoraki / Mount Cook | Summit | New Zealand | |
| 6 | Great Barrier Reef | Coral reef | Australia | ✓ |
| 7 | Mount Yasur | Volcano | Vanuatu | |
| 8 | Cœur de Voh | Geoglyph | New Caledonia | |
| 9 | Jellyfish Lake | Lake | Palau | |
| 10 | Rainbow Reef | Coral reef | Fiji | |
| 11 | Moorea | Island | French Polynesia | |
| 12 | The Twelve Apostles | Stack | Australia | |
| 13 | Kakadu National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 14 | Franz Josef Glacier | Glacier | New Zealand | |
| 15 | Queen Victoria Building | Covered passageway | Australia | |
| 16 | Sydney Opera House | Opera house | Australia | ✓ |
| 17 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 18 | Three Sisters (Blue Mountains) | Rock formation | Australia | |
| 19 | Cradle Mountain | Mountain | Australia | |
| 20 | Jenolan Caves | Cave | Australia | |
| 21 | Lake Tekapo | Lake | New Zealand | |
| 22 | Lake Wakatipu | Lake | New Zealand | |
| 23 | Kangaroo Island | Island | Australia | |
| 24 | K'gari | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 25 | Blue Lake (Warwar) | Volcanic crater lake | Australia | |
| 26 | Kings Canyon | Canyon | Australia | |
| 27 | Luna Park | Amusement park | Australia | |
| 28 | Moeraki Boulders / Kaihinaki | Rock formation | New Zealand | |
| 29 | Sydney Harbour Bridge | Bridge | Australia | |
| 30 | Champagne Pool | Hot spring | New Zealand |
01 Milford Sound / Piopiotahi
New Zealand44.617° S 167.867° E
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Milford Sound / Piopiotahi is a fiord in the far southwest of New Zealand's South Island, cut by glaciers into the mountains of Fiordland and running about 15 km inland from the Tasman Sea.
Did you know? Jim Dennistoun made the first ascent of Mitre Peak alone in 1911; doubters were silenced in 1914 when climbers found his handkerchief in a summit cairn.
02 Bora Bora
Bora-Bora
French Polynesia16.498° S 151.736° W
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay Bora Bora is what remains of a volcano that was active roughly three and a half to three million years ago and has since been sinking slowly into the Pacific.
Did you know? Its Second World War airstrip on Motu Mute was French Polynesia's only international airport until Faa'a Airport opened on Tahiti in 1960.
03 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.
04 Rock Islands Southern Lagoon
Palau · 16.9 km from Koror7.247° N 134.352° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Luka Peternel · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Rock Islands of Palau rise from a turquoise lagoon as hundreds of rounded green domes, each one a lump of ancient coral limestone capped with dense forest. Many are shaped like mushrooms or umbrellas, pinched in at the waterline where a notch has been worn into the rock.
Did you know? Stone villages built on some islands between roughly 1050 and 1500 were abandoned in the 17th and 18th centuries, leaving walls, terraces and house platforms.
05 Aoraki / Mount Cook
New Zealand43.595° S 170.142° E
Image by kewl from Pixabay Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, rises to 3,724 metres in the Southern Alps, the range that runs the length of the South Island. It has three summits in a long, almost level ridge, Low Peak, Middle Peak and High Peak, which give the mountain a distinctive blocky profile seen from east or west.
Did you know? Edmund Hillary made his first ascent in January 1948, and a month later joined the first climb of the South Ridge, renamed Hillary Ridge in 2011.
06 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.
07 Mount Yasur
Vanuatu19.533° S 169.442° E
Rolf Cosar · CC BY 2.5 Few volcanoes let you stand on the rim and watch them work, and Yasur on the island of Tanna is the rare one that does it several times an hour. The cone is modest — just 361 metres above the sea — a bare, grey pyroclastic hill rising from a plain of ash near Sulphur Bay on the island's south-east side.
Did you know? Yasur grew inside the Siwi caldera, a basin about 4 kilometres wide left by an earlier, far larger explosive eruption.
08 Cœur de Voh
New Caledonia20.938° S 164.658° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay From the air, a clearing in a New Caledonian mangrove takes the unmistakable shape of a heart. The Cœur de Voh is a natural opening of about four hectares in the mangrove forest at the mouth of the Témala River, on the north-west coast of Grande Terre, the main island of New Caledonia.
Did you know? In 2002 France's La Poste put Arthus-Bertrand's image of the heart on a stamp issued for Valentine's Day.
09 Jellyfish Lake
Palau · 22.8 km from Koror7.161° N 134.376° E
FoxyStranger Kawasaki · CC BY-SA 3.0 Jellyfish Lake is a small marine lake on the island of Eil Malk in Palau's Rock Islands, and it is home to vast numbers of golden jellyfish that drift across it every day in pursuit of the sun.
Did you know? A dense band of purple sulphur bacteria floats just below the oxygen line, absorbing all the sunlight so the deep water beneath is dark yet remarkably clear.
10 Rainbow Reef
Fiji16.777° S 179.932° E
(c) Debra Baker, some rights reserved (CC BY) · CC BY 4.0 Rainbow Reef earns its name honestly.
Did you know? At Annie's Bommies several large coral heads rise from the reef, each hung with soft coral gardens and patrolled by zebra sharks.
11 Moorea
French Polynesia · 26.6 km from Papeete17.535° S 149.835° W
Image by Michelle-Maria from Pixabay Moʻorea rises from the sea 17 km north-west of Tahiti, and seen from its larger neighbour it is a jagged silhouette of spires and saw-toothed ridges. 5 million years ago.
Did you know? In 1774 the Spanish captain Domingo de Bonechea called at the island and named it Santo Domingo.
12 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.
13 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.
14 Franz Josef Glacier
New Zealand43.475° S 170.200° E
Image by RobO100 from Pixabay Few glaciers anywhere come down as far or as fast as Franz Josef.
Did you know? A 1946 postage stamp showed the glacier framed by the altar window of St James Church; by 1954 the ice had vanished from that view, returning briefly in 1997.
15 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.
16 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.
17 Fiordland National Park
New Zealand45.386° S 167.347° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay 2 million hectares of temperate rainforest and 14 fjords gouged out by glaciers that retreated long enough ago for forest to reclaim nearly every slope down to the waterline.
Did you know? The Milford Track was opened in 1889 by Quintin McKinnon and Donald Sutherland, and a 1908 article in The Spectator called it the finest walk in the world.
18 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.
19 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.
20 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.
21 Lake Tekapo
New Zealand43.900° S 170.525° E
Image by Holgi from Pixabay Lake Tekapo lies at about 710 metres in the Mackenzie Basin of New Zealand's South Island, a long glacial trough roughly 27 kilometres from end to end and up to 6 kilometres across.
Did you know? The lake reaches about 120 metres at its deepest and holds roughly six cubic kilometres of water.
22 Lake Wakatipu
New Zealand · 14.7 km from Queenstown45.085° S 168.561° E
Jamie Wang · CC BY-SA 2.0 Lake Wakatipu fills a trough that a glacier gouged into the mountains of Central Otago during the last ice age, and it still has the shape of something carved rather than poured: a long, narrow body of water bent twice into a dog leg, 80 kilometres from end to end.
Did you know? One of the first Europeans to reach the lake in 1856 accidentally set off a large scrub fire by tossing away a match on the shore.
23 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.
24 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.
25 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.
26 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.
27 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.
28 Moeraki Boulders / Kaihinaki
New Zealand · 29.4 km from Oamaru45.345° S 170.826° E
Image by Simon from Pixabay On Koekohe Beach, on the Otago coast of New Zealand's South Island, a scattering of grey stone spheres lies at the edge of the surf as if a game of giant marbles had been abandoned. Some sit alone, some in clusters; some are half buried in the sand, others have split open to show a hollow, crystal-lined heart.
Did you know? Similar but even bigger concretions, the Koutu Boulders on Hokianga Harbour in the North Island, reach about three metres across.
29 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.
30 Champagne Pool
New Zealand · 27.4 km from Rotorua38.359° S 176.369° E
Image by alexandramorcos from Pixabay Champagne Pool is a hot spring in the Waiotapu geothermal field on New Zealand's North Island, and it is one of the most painted-looking natural objects on Earth.
Did you know? That microbe lives on the 'knallgas' reaction, combining hydrogen and oxygen into water, and grows best at about 70 °C.
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 Oceania?
- On our list, Milford Sound / Piopiotahi (New Zealand) ranks first, followed by Bora Bora (French Polynesia) and Uluru (Australia).
- Which country has the most places in Oceania?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (55), New Zealand (37) and French Polynesia (4).
- Why aren't there twelve of the Twelve Apostles?
- There were never twelve stacks; the name was chosen for its appeal. The stacks are slowly eroded by the Southern Ocean, and one of them collapsed in 2005.
- How big is the Great Barrier Reef?
- The Great Barrier Reef is made up of nearly 3,000 individual reefs and hundreds of islands spread over more than 2,300 kilometres off the coast of Queensland.
- What is Uluru made of?
- Uluru is formed of arkose, a coarse-grained sandstone rich in feldspar. Iron minerals in the rock weather to rust, which gives it its red colour.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Oceania?
- In our collection, the places in Oceania are most often islands (13), rock formations (12), national parks (12) and nature sanctuaries (11).
- How many places are on this list in Oceania?
- The list covers 105 places in 9 countries. Australia has the most, with 55.