The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Nature Sanctuaries in Oceania
9 places in 2 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed nature sanctuaries in Oceania are Fiordland National Park (New Zealand), K'gari (Australia) and Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park (Australia). The list covers 9 UNESCO-listed nature sanctuaries in 2 countries. Australia has the most, with 6. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Oceania's World Heritage reserves owe their character to long isolation. Australia's ancient, worn-down continent preserves landforms hundreds of millions of years old, while New Zealand's young mountains are still rising and grinding under ice, and both carry life and cultural traditions that developed nowhere else.
Fiordland National Park, part of the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Area, has glacier-carved fiords such as Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound under walls of rainforest. Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park joins the great sandstone monolith with the domes of Kata Tjuṯa, and it is listed for both its landscape and Anangu culture. Ningaloo Reef runs so close to the shore of Western Australia that coral can be reached from the beach, and whale sharks gather along it each year. Westland Tai Poutini National Park carries the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers down toward temperate rainforest. Purnululu National Park is known for the Bungle Bungle Range, beehive-shaped domes striped orange and black.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 2 | K'gari | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 3 | Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 4 | Blue Mountains National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 5 | Ningaloo Reef | Coral reef | Australia | ✓ |
| 6 | Lamington National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 7 | Westland Tai Poutini National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 8 | Purnululu National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 9 | Mount Aspiring National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
01 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. Rudyard Kipling once called Milford Sound the eighth wonder of the world, and the sound alone gets roughly 6,000 to 8,000 millimetres of rain a year — several times London's annual total — spread across some 180 days.
Did you know? The park covers about 12,600 square kilometres and makes up nearly half of the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Site in south-west New Zealand.
02 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.
03 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. Uluṟu stands 348 metres above the plain with most of its bulk hidden underground, and its surface shifts colour through the day, glowing deep red at dawn and dusk because of iron oxide in the rock.
Did you know? Mount Olga, the highest dome of Kata Tjuṯa, rises about 546 metres above the plain, nearly 200 metres higher than Uluṟu.
04 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. Blue Mountains National Park protects the heart of this country: more than 260,000 hectares of cliffs, waterfalls, hanging swamps and eucalypt forest stretching along the eastern flank of the Great Dividing Range.
Did you know? The park is the central of eight reserves that make up the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, listed in 2000.
05 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 World Heritage area protects more than 700,000 hectares of reef, sea and arid cape, some 1,200 km north of Perth.
06 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 Lamington spreads across the high plateau of the McPherson Range on the border between Queensland and New South Wales, its rim standing around 900 metres above sea level only a short distance inland from the Pacific surf of the Gold Coast.
Did you know? Lamington National Park was established in 1915 and named after Lord Lamington, Governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1902.
07 Westland Tai Poutini National Park
New Zealand43.567° S 170.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by ThierryBEUVE from Pixabay Westland Tai Poutini National Park runs from the crest of the Southern Alps down to the Tasman Sea on the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island, and within a short distance it goes from peaks over 3,000 m to lowland rainforest and coastal lagoons. The highest point is Mount Tasman at 3,498 m.
Did you know? Franz Josef Glacier's Māori name means 'the tears of Hine Hukatere': according to legend, her tears for her lover Tuawe, killed by an avalanche, froze into ice.
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? Purnululu means 'sandstone' in the local Kija (Gija) language; the origin of the name Bungle Bungle is uncertain and may come from a misheard word or a local grass.
09 Mount Aspiring National Park
New Zealand44.383° S 168.733° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Tomas Sobek · CC BY 2.0 Mount Aspiring National Park covers more than 3,500 square kilometres of the southern end of the Southern Alps, a wilderness of ice-capped peaks, hanging glaciers, deep U-shaped valleys and beech forest that stretches from the head of Lake Wānaka toward Fiordland.
Did you know? Since 1990 the park has been part of the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Area.
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 UNESCO-listed nature sanctuaries in Oceania?
- On our list, Fiordland National Park (New Zealand) ranks first, followed by K'gari (Australia) and Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park (Australia).
- Which country has the most UNESCO-listed nature sanctuaries in Oceania?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (6) and New Zealand (3).
- Why are the Bungle Bungles striped?
- The orange bands are sandstone stained by iron oxides, while the darker bands hold more moisture and are coloured by cyanobacteria. The layers alternate because of differences in how much water each layer keeps.
- What is Te Wāhipounamu?
- It is the World Heritage Area in the southwest of New Zealand's South Island, listed in 1990. It joins Fiordland, Mount Aspiring, Aoraki/Mount Cook and Westland Tai Poutini national parks.
- How many UNESCO-listed nature sanctuaries are on this list in Oceania?
- The list covers 9 UNESCO-listed nature sanctuaries in 2 countries. Australia has the most, with 6.