The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty in Australia
10 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in Australia are Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park and K'gari. The list covers 10 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Criterion (vii) is the only one of UNESCO's ten that is about natural beauty and superlative phenomena, rather than geology, ecology or culture. Australia meets it as an old, flat, isolated continent: weathering over hundreds of millions of years has left lone monoliths and striped domes inland, while warm, clear seas along the coasts built the largest reefs on the planet.
The Great Barrier Reef runs for more than 2,300 kilometres along Queensland, a chain of thousands of reefs and hundreds of islands. On the other side of the continent, Ningaloo is a fringing reef so close to shore that it can be reached from the beach, and whale sharks gather there each year. Lord Howe Island, a crescent of volcanic rock in the Tasman Sea, has the southernmost coral reef in the world, and Ball's Pyramid, the eroded remnant of a shield volcano nearby, is the tallest volcanic sea stack on Earth.
Inland the palette turns red and orange. Uluṟu is a single sandstone monolith that changes colour with the light, and Kata Tjuṯa to the west is a group of great domes; both are sacred to the Aṉangu people. Purnululu in the Kimberley is known for the Bungle Bungle Range, beehive domes banded in orange and black. Lake McKenzie on K'gari is a perched lake of rainwater, so clear that its white silica sand shows through.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Great Barrier Reef | Coral reef | ✓ |
| 2 | Kakadu National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 3 | K'gari | Island | ✓ |
| 4 | Lord Howe Island | Island | ✓ |
| 5 | Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 6 | Ball's Pyramid | Stack | ✓ |
| 7 | Ningaloo Reef | Coral reef | ✓ |
| 8 | Macquarie Island | Island | ✓ |
| 9 | Lake McKenzie | Lake | |
| 10 | Purnululu National Park | National park | ✓ |
01 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 There's still an enormous amount of reef left to see, and it changes character depending on when you visit. Dwarf minke and humpback whales pass through the northern reef from around June to October, with July and August the peak; further north, a multi-species coral spawning event follows the November full moon most years, a synchronized release that briefly turns whole reef sections into a snowstorm underwater.
Did you know? Aboriginal Australians have lived alongside the reef for at least 40,000 years, and Torres Strait Islanders for about 10,000.
02 Kakadu National Park
Australia13.005° S 132.520° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Squirrel_photos from Pixabay The park is also scarred by and wrapped around an industrial site: the Ranger uranium mine, enclaved within Kakadu, ceased operations in January 2021, while feral water buffalo, pigs and invasive weeds remain management problems. The Bowali Visitor Centre near Jabiru, the park's only town, is the place to start and to check which roads and sites are open.
03 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 The ocean side is a different world. The so-called 75-Mile Beach runs along most of the east coast and is legally a road, used by four-wheel drives and even as a landing strip for light aircraft. Along it lie the Champagne Pools, the rocky headland of Indian Head, the outflow of Eli Creek and the rusting hull of the Maheno, a former trans-Tasman liner and First World War hospital ship that was driven ashore by a cyclone in 1935 while under tow to the breakers. The island's dingoes are believed to be among the purest in eastern Australia; dogs are banned to keep them that way, and feeding them is prohibited.
04 Lord Howe Island
Australia31.550° S 159.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
EmGer7 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Lord Howe Island Group was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1982. Life on the island is deliberately small in scale: a few hundred residents and a cap of 400 visitors at any one time. The rewards are quiet ones — snorkelling over the reef in the lagoon, watching seabirds wheel around the cliffs, or climbing Mount Gower to look down on the whole island and the pyramid beyond.
Did you know? It sits on the Lord Howe Rise, part of Zealandia, a largely sunken microcontinent that broke away from Gondwana.
05 Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park
Australia25.322° S 130.986° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay The park covers about 1,326 square kilometres and is listed by UNESCO for both its natural and its cultural values, as well as being a biosphere reserve. What looks like empty desert is a rich arid ecosystem: at least seven species of bat roost in the crevices of the rocks, 73 species of reptile have been recorded, and after the rare heavy rains waterfalls pour off the rock faces and frogs appear in the pools at their base. Walking trails such as the Liru, Mala and Kuniya walks lead around the base of Uluṟu, and dedicated viewing areas are laid out for sunrise and sunset over both formations.
Did you know? The surveyor William Gosse sighted Uluṟu on 19 July 1873 and named it Ayers Rock after Henry Ayers, then Chief Secretary of South Australia.
06 Ball's Pyramid
Australia31.754° S 159.252° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
PotMart186 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The most remarkable chapter of its story is biological. The Lord Howe Island stick insect, a large flightless insect sometimes called a "tree lobster", was last seen on its home island around 1920 and was long presumed extinct. In 2001 researchers climbing the pyramid found a tiny surviving population, a couple of dozen individuals living under a single shrub on a ledge about 100 metres above the sea. Two pairs were taken to the mainland to start a breeding programme, and the colony on the rock became one of the best-known stories of rediscovery in conservation. The pyramid and the surrounding waters belong to the Lord Howe Island group, which is inscribed on the World Heritage list.
Did you know? Its cliffs continue below the waves to a shelf about 50 metres deep, separated from Lord Howe Island's shelf by a 500-metre-deep submarine canyon.
07 Ningaloo Reef
Australia22.739° S 113.628° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Ningaloo Coast, including the reef, the Cape Range park and the land around it, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011.
Did you know? The name Ningaloo comes from the Wajarri language and is variously translated as "promontory", "deep water" or "high land jutting into the sea".
08 Macquarie Island
Australia54.630° S 158.860° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
L. R. Blake (d. 1918) · Public domain Sealers found the island in July 1810, when the Australian captain Frederick Hasselborough came upon it while looking for new hunting grounds. For more than a century seals and then penguins were boiled down for oil, until some populations were close to vanishing. The hunters also brought rabbits, rats and mice, which stripped the vegetation. After a seven-year eradication campaign, the island was declared free of these pests in 2014. It was the largest successful island eradication attempted up to that time. Australia's Antarctic program keeps a research station on the narrow isthmus at the northern end, with a small year-round crew.
09 Lake McKenzie
Australia · 27.9 km from Hervey Bay25.446° S 153.057° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Hagai Agmon-Snir حچاي اچمون-سنير חגי אגמון-שניר · CC BY-SA 4.0 The lake is fragile. With so few nutrients, sunscreen, soap and oils pollute it, and visitors are asked not to bring them into the water. K'gari is also home to one of the purest dingo populations in eastern Australia – wongari to the Butchulla – and the island's rangers ask every visitor to be dingo-safe.
Did you know? K'gari holds about half of all the perched freshwater dune lakes known in the world, one reason the island was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1992.
10 Purnululu National Park
Australia17.449° S 128.546° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 On foot, the landscape turns into a maze. From the Piccaninny car park a trail winds between the domes and down between two rock walls into Cathedral Gorge, a vast natural amphitheatre of red rock. Echidna Chasm, by contrast, is a soaring slot canyon, its walls pressing close overhead, and the gorges that dissect the plateau run 100 to 200 m deep. From the air the domes appear as an endless field of orange and black hives, which is how the world first saw them.
Did you know? North-east of Piccaninny Gorge lies the Piccaninny crater, a meteorite impact structure about seven kilometres across that is best seen from the air.
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 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in Australia?
- On our list, Great Barrier Reef ranks first, followed by Kakadu National Park and K'gari.
- What is Ball's Pyramid?
- It is a sharp volcanic stack about 562 metres high, rising from the sea some 20 kilometres southeast of Lord Howe Island. It is the eroded remnant of a shield volcano and the tallest volcanic stack in the world.
- Why are the Bungle Bungle domes striped?
- The orange bands are sandstone coated with iron oxide, while the dark bands hold more moisture and are coloured by cyanobacteria living on the rock.
- Why is Lake McKenzie so clear?
- It is a perched lake: rainwater sits on a hard layer of organic sediment above the water table. With no rivers flowing in and pure silica sand on its bed, the water stays clear and low in nutrients.
- How many UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty are on this list in Australia?
- The list covers 10 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty.