The Most Beautiful Places in Western Australia
15 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Western Australia are Wolfe Creek Crater, Ningaloo Reef and Karijini National Park. The list covers 15 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Western Australia covers about a third of the continent, and much of it sits on some of the oldest rock on Earth. Ancient granite, iron-rich ranges and sandstone have been weathered for so long that the land breaks into domes, gorges and pillars, while the long Indian Ocean coast adds white beaches, pink lakes and huge tides in the north. Distances are vast, and each region, from the tropical Kimberley to the temperate south coast, has its own character.
In the Kimberley, Purnululu National Park holds the Bungle Bungle Range, sandstone domes banded in orange and black. Wolfe Creek Crater is a remarkably well-preserved meteorite crater on the edge of the desert, and Mitchell Falls drops over tiers of sandstone. At the Horizontal Falls in Talbot Bay, tides force seawater through two narrow gaps in the cliffs, creating rapids that reverse with each tide. In the Pilbara, Karijini National Park cuts deep, narrow gorges into the Hamersley Range.
Further south, the Pinnacles Desert in Nambung National Park scatters thousands of limestone pillars across yellow sand, and Wave Rock near Hyden is a granite cliff shaped like a breaking wave. Along the coast, Hutt Lagoon turns pink from salt-loving algae, Shell Beach in Shark Bay is made of tiny cockle shells instead of sand, Nature's Window in Kalbarri frames the Murchison River gorge in a sandstone arch, and Lucky Bay near Esperance is known for its white sand and kangaroos on the beach.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wolfe Creek Crater | Impact crater | |
| 2 | Ningaloo Reef | Coral reef | ✓ |
| 3 | Karijini National Park | National park | |
| 4 | Horizontal Falls | Waterfall | |
| 5 | Lake Hillier | Lake | |
| 6 | Pinnacles Desert | Rock formation | |
| 7 | Wave Rock | Rock formation | |
| 8 | Purnululu National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 9 | Hutt Lagoon | Lagoon | |
| 10 | Mitchell Falls | Waterfall | |
| 11 | Murujuga National Park | Petroglyph | |
| 12 | Lucky Bay | Beach | |
| 13 | Shell Beach | Beach | |
| 14 | Hamelin Pool | Lagoon | |
| 15 | Nature's Window | Natural arch |
01 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.
02 Ningaloo Reef
Australia22.739° S 113.628° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ningaloo is a reef you can wade out to. Along the coast of Western Australia's North West Cape, the coral grows not far beyond the beach — in places less than 500 metres offshore — so that you can step off white sand into a lagoon and float straight over coral gardens.
Did you know? The Baiyungu and Yinigudura peoples, part of the Yamatji, are the traditional owners of the Ningaloo coast.
03 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.
04 Horizontal Falls
Australia16.380° S 123.959° E
Reefpix · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Horizontal Falls are a waterfall made by the sea. In Talbot Bay, on the Kimberley coast of Western Australia, the tide has to pass in and out through two narrow gaps in the iron-red ridges of the McLarty Ranges: the seaward gap is about 20 m wide, the inner one only about 10 m.
Did you know? The Kimberley coast has some of the largest tides on Earth, and here the range can exceed 10 metres at its peak.
05 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.
06 Pinnacles Desert
The Pinnacles
Australia30.606° S 115.157° E
Image by Redkite from Pixabay The Pinnacles are thousands of limestone pillars standing in the yellow sand of Nambung National Park, on the coast north of Perth.
Did you know? The park takes its name from an Aboriginal word thought to mean crooked or winding, first given in 1938 to the Nambung River.
07 Wave Rock
Australia32.444° S 118.898° E
DaHuzyBru · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the edge of the Western Australian wheatbelt, a granite cliff curls over at the top like a breaker frozen a moment before it falls. Wave Rock is about 15 m high and more than 100 m long, one face of a granite inselberg made of three domes.
Did you know? The rainwater wall along the crest is thought to have changed how runoff streams down the face, helping turn it red and orange with black streaks.
08 Purnululu National Park
Australia17.449° S 128.546° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 Until 1983 the Bungle Bungle Range was known almost only to its Aboriginal owners and a few pastoralists. That year an aerial film crew making a documentary on the wonders of Western Australia flew over it, and the images of hundreds of striped, beehive-shaped domes rising from the savannah stunned the country.
Did you know? Climbing on the domes is forbidden, because their loosely bound sandstone crumbles easily and walking on it would speed up erosion.
09 Hutt Lagoon
Australia28.133° S 114.217° E
Stephen Edmonds · CC BY-SA 3.0 Hutt Lagoon is a long, shallow salt lake behind the dunes of Western Australia's Mid West coast, and for much of the year it is pink. The colour comes from Dunaliella salina, a microscopic alga that thrives in very salty water and protects itself with beta-carotene, the same pigment that colours carrots.
Did you know? The whole lagoon covers about 70 square kilometres, an elongated basin trapped between the beach barrier and older coastal dunes.
10 Mitchell Falls
Australia14.822° S 125.695° E
Aussie Oc at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 On the remote Mitchell Plateau in the far north of Western Australia, the Mitchell River steps down through four cascading tiers. Each tier spills into a deep green pool held between sheer walls of orange sandstone.
Did you know? The rare rough-scaled python lives among the sandstone of the plateau, alongside the monjon rock-wallaby.
11 Murujuga National Park
Australia · 16.7 km from Karratha20.583° S 116.833° E
Marius Fenger · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the Burrup Peninsula in the Pilbara, piles of rust-red boulders tumble down the hillsides like the ruins of some giant's wall — and a startling number of them are engraved.
Did you know? In 2020 divers confirmed Australia's first ancient Aboriginal underwater sites here: 269 stone artefacts off Cape Bruguieres and a submerged freshwater spring about 8,500 years old.
12 Lucky Bay
Australia · 35.2 km from Esperance33.994° S 122.232° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay Lucky Bay is a long, gentle arc of beach in Cape Le Grand National Park, on the south coast of Western Australia east of Esperance. Its sand is extraordinarily white and fine: made almost purely of frosted quartz grains, with nothing to dull them.
Did you know? William Westall, the Investigator's landscape artist, depicted the bay in the painting A Bay on the South Coast of New Holland, one of the earliest European images of this coast.
13 Shell Beach
Australia26.215° S 113.774° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay Where the sand should be, there is none: along the shore of L'Haridon Bight in Shark Bay, the white strip between the red scrubland and the turquoise water is made almost entirely of tiny shells.
Did you know? Like giant clams, the Shark Bay cockle hosts photosynthetic algae in its tissues that feed it with sugars alongside the plankton it filters.
14 Hamelin Pool
Australia26.061° S 113.960° E
Donald Hobern from Copenhagen, Denmark · CC BY 2.0 At first sight the shallows of Hamelin Pool look like a field of dark, rounded stones scattered along the shore.
Did you know? The water stays hypersaline because the hot, dry climate drives evaporation far beyond rainfall, while seagrass banks hold back the ocean tides that would dilute it.
15 Nature's Window
Australia27.553° S 114.446° E
ChatDaniels · CC BY-SA 3.0 High on the rim of the Murchison River gorge in Western Australia, wind and weather have hollowed a slab of banded sandstone into a natural arch.
Did you know? One trackway in the sandstone records two animals converging and walking as a single track before one of them veers away to the left.
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 Western Australia?
- On our list, Wolfe Creek Crater ranks first, followed by Ningaloo Reef and Karijini National Park.
- Why is Hutt Lagoon pink?
- The salty lagoon contains the microalga Dunaliella salina, which produces carotenoid pigments. Depending on light and salinity, the water appears pink, red or lilac.
- What are the Horizontal Falls?
- They are tidal rapids in Talbot Bay in the Kimberley. Large tides push water through two narrow gorges faster than it can equalise, so it piles up on one side and rushes through like a waterfall lying on its side.
- What is Shell Beach made of?
- Instead of sand, the beach in Shark Bay consists of billions of small shells of a cockle species that thrives in the bay's unusually salty water.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Western Australia?
- In our collection, the places in Western Australia are most often rock formations (2), waterfalls (2), beaches (2) and lagoons (2).
- How many places are on this list in Western Australia?
- The list covers 15 places.