The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty in Oceania
15 places in 4 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in Oceania are Great Barrier Reef (Australia), Kakadu National Park (Australia) and Fiordland National Park (New Zealand). The list covers 15 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in 4 countries. Australia has the most, with 10. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Criterion (vii), the only one of UNESCO's ten that is about beauty itself, fits Oceania well. Long isolation, warm shallow seas and active plate boundaries gave the region the largest coral reef systems on Earth, desert monoliths, and in New Zealand mountains pushed up so fast that glaciers descend almost to rainforest.
The Great Barrier Reef runs for more than 2,300 kilometres along Queensland, with thousands of individual reefs and hundreds of islands. Ningaloo on the Western Australian coast is a fringing reef close to shore, where whale sharks gather each year. The lagoons of New Caledonia enclose one of the largest reef systems in the world, and Palau's Rock Islands Southern Lagoon is a maze of mushroom-shaped limestone islands over turquoise water. Lord Howe Island rises from the Tasman Sea with Ball's Pyramid nearby, the tallest volcanic sea stack in the world.
Inland Australia brings rock and colour. Uluṟu is a single sandstone monolith that turns deep red at sunrise and sunset, with the domes of Kata Tjuṯa to the west; both are sacred to the Aṉangu. Purnululu in the Kimberley is known for the striped beehive domes of the Bungle Bungle Range, and Lake McKenzie on K'gari is a clear freshwater lake ringed by white silica sand. In New Zealand, Fiordland's sounds are cut deep into the mountains, while Westland Tai Poutini carries the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers down towards the coast.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Great Barrier Reef | Coral reef | Australia | ✓ |
| 2 | Kakadu National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 3 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 4 | K'gari | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 5 | Lord Howe Island | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 6 | Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 7 | Ball's Pyramid | Stack | Australia | ✓ |
| 8 | Ningaloo Reef | Coral reef | Australia | ✓ |
| 9 | New Caledonia Barrier Reef | Coral reef | New Caledonia | |
| 10 | Macquarie Island | Island | Australia | ✓ |
| 11 | Lake McKenzie | Lake | Australia | |
| 12 | Westland Tai Poutini National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 13 | Purnululu National Park | National park | Australia | ✓ |
| 14 | Mount Aspiring National Park | National park | New Zealand | ✓ |
| 15 | Rock Islands Southern Lagoon | Lagoon | Palau |
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 That scale hasn't made it immune to stress. When water gets unusually warm, corals expel the colorful algae living in their tissue and turn ghostly white — a process called bleaching that isn't always fatal on its own, but leaves coral weakened and vulnerable if the heat doesn't ease up. The reef has been through documented mass bleaching events in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2025, and researchers estimate roughly half of its shallow-water coral cover has been lost since 2016 alone — a fact worth knowing before you go, not instead of going.
Did you know? The reef got its name from Matthew Flinders, who charted it in far greater detail in 1802.
02 Kakadu National Park
Australia13.005° S 132.520° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Squirrel_photos from Pixabay The rock art is the heart of that cultural value. More than 5,000 art sites are recorded, painted over thousands of years in the rock shelters of the escarpment and its outliers, and they are among the finest bodies of Aboriginal rock art in Australia. Two sites, Ubirr in the north near the East Alligator River and Nourlangie further south, are among the most visited places in the park, with paintings of animals, people and ancestral beings along short walking trails.
03 Fiordland National Park
New Zealand45.386° S 167.347° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay That rain does something specific underwater that most visitors never see. Runoff stained brown by forest tannins settles into a layer up to 10 metres deep on top of the denser seawater, and that dark layer filters sunlight so effectively that light conditions at 10 metres underwater match what you'd normally find at 70 metres in the open ocean. The effect is that black coral — a species that anywhere else needs depths beyond recreational diving limits — grows here at just 10 metres down, well within reach of an ordinary dive. The fjord looks calm on the surface; underneath, the rain is running an entirely different depth simulation.
Did you know? Some of its fiords reach as far as 40 kilometres inland from the Tasman Sea.
04 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 What astonishes visitors is that a heap of sand can hold rainforest. Tall forests grow in its interior, sustained by fungi in the soil that let plants draw nutrients from nothing but sand, fed by spring-fed creeks that run through most of the island's valleys. The island has more than a hundred freshwater lakes, including some forty perched lakes — lakes held above the water table on a hardened layer of sand and plant matter, about half of all such lakes known on Earth.
05 Lord Howe Island
Australia31.550° S 159.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
EmGer7 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The island was first sighted by Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball in February 1788 and it stayed uninhabited until 1834, when a whaling ship left three men to set up a supply station. Its isolation produced a remarkable roll of endemic life: the Lord Howe woodhen, a ground-dwelling bird found nowhere else; the kentia palm, Howea forsteriana; and the Lord Howe Island stick insect. The only wild population of that insect was found on Ball's Pyramid, a jagged volcanic spire 551 m tall that stands alone in the sea about 23 km to the southeast — one of the most dramatic rocks in any ocean.
Did you know? The island is the eroded stump of a shield volcano about seven million years old, and it is expected to disappear beneath the sea within some 200,000 years.
06 Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park
Australia25.322° S 130.986° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay For the Aṉangu, the traditional owners, these are not scenic backdrops but living places. The features of Uluṟu are the marks left by ancestral beings in the creation period, and parts of Kata Tjuṯa hold knowledge reserved for initiated men. In 1985 the freehold title was handed back to the Aṉangu, who leased the park to the federal government for 99 years; it has since been run under joint management, and Aṉangu guides lead walks that explain bush foods, plants and Tjukurpa stories. In 2019, after a unanimous vote by the park board, the chains of the old climbing route were removed and climbing ended for good, in keeping with the owners' long-standing wish.
Did you know? The explorer Ernest Giles named Mount Olga in 1872 at the request of the botanist Ferdinand von Mueller, honouring Queen Olga of Württemberg, who had just made Mueller a baron.
07 Ball's Pyramid
Australia31.754° S 159.252° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
PotMart186 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The rock takes its name from Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball of the Royal Navy, after whom it was named in 1788. It was charted in detail in 1853, and the first person known to have set foot on it was the geologist Henry Wilkinson in 1882. Climbers reached the summit only in February 1965, and the pyramid became a coveted objective until the authorities banned climbing in 1982; since 1990 ascents have been possible only under strict conditions with official approval.
Did you know? It rises from the Lord Howe Rise, part of Zealandia, a largely submerged continent beneath the south-west Pacific.
08 Ningaloo Reef
Australia22.739° S 113.628° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The reef is famous above all for its big visitors. From around March to August, whale sharks — the largest fish in the sea — gather along the outer reef, and Ningaloo is one of the most reliable places on earth to swim beside them. In winter the same waters become a migration route for humpback whales, manta rays, dolphins and dugongs. Within the reef itself live some 500 species of fish, around 300 of coral and some 600 of molluscs.
Did you know? Novelist Tim Winton donated his A$25,000 Western Australian Premier's Book Award prize in 2002 to the campaign against a resort planned at Mauds Landing.
09 New Caledonia Barrier Reef
Lagons de Nouvelle-Calédonie
New Caledonia20.412° S 164.566° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay The reef is remarkable for its variety rather than just its scale. Scientists have described well over a hundred distinct reef formations here, from fringing reefs hugging the coast to double barriers, patch reefs and sandy islets, and the counts of life match the larger reefs of the Pacific: more than 2,300 species of fish from nearly 250 families and over 2,000 species of molluscs. The lagoon shelters one of the largest dugong populations anywhere, green turtles come ashore to nest on its cays, humpback whales visit its waters, and sharks gather in the passes where the tide pours in and out of the lagoon.
Did you know? The World Heritage property is made up of six separate marine clusters covering more than 15,700 square kilometres of reef and lagoon.
10 Macquarie Island
Australia54.630° S 158.860° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
L. R. Blake (d. 1918) · Public domain The island is long and narrow, about 35 km by 5 km, and lies roughly halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica, some 1,500 km southeast of Tasmania. Its beaches carry one of the great wildlife gatherings of the Southern Ocean. The entire world population of royal penguins comes here to breed. More than 80,000 southern elephant seals haul out on its shores, and about three and a half million seabirds of thirteen species breed here, several kinds of penguin among them.
11 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 What makes it extraordinary is colour and clarity. The shore is almost pure white silica, soft underfoot, and the sand runs out under the water so that the shallows glow a pale aquamarine before the lake drops away into a deep, saturated blue. Because the water is filtered by sand and fed only by rain, it carries almost no nutrients; it is so pure that few plants and animals can live in it, which is exactly why it is so transparent. Seen from the bank on a bright day, the line between the two blues looks drawn with a ruler.
Did you know? Radiocarbon dating revealed that this deep lake nevertheless dried out around 7,500 years ago, overturning the belief that K'gari's lakes had held water ever since the ice age ended.
12 Westland Tai Poutini National Park
New Zealand43.567° S 170.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by ThierryBEUVE from Pixabay Franz Josef Glacier, Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere, and Fox Glacier, Te Moeka o Tuawe, descend from the snowfields of the main divide towards valleys lined with rainforest, so that ice and green forest lie within sight of each other. Near Fox Glacier township lies Lake Matheson, a small dark lake formed when a block of glacial ice melted out as Fox Glacier retreated some 14,000 years ago. 6 km leads round it to the classic viewpoints. To the north, Ōkārito Lagoon is a haunt of the white heron, kōtuku, and the lowland forests shelter the rowi, or Ōkārito kiwi, an endangered kiwi of the lowland forest.
Did you know? Fox Glacier's Māori name, Te Moeka o Tuawe, means 'the bed of Tuawe', completing the story of the two lovers.
13 Purnululu National Park
Australia17.449° S 128.546° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The domes are the park's signature. They are carved from Devonian sandstone, a plateau worn over some 20 million years into cone-shaped towers up to 250 m high with steep sides and rounded tops. The famous banding is a living skin: orange layers are stained by oxidised iron where the rock dries out quickly, while the dark grey bands are crusts of cyanobacteria growing where moisture lingers. Both help to hold the fragile surface together. The Bungle Bungles are one of the finest examples in the world of cone karst formed in sandstone, and exactly how they took shape is still not fully understood.
Did you know? The sandstone of the domes was laid down roughly 350 to 375 million years ago from sand and pebbles washed in by rivers from nearby mountains.
14 Mount Aspiring National Park
New Zealand44.383° S 168.733° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Tomas Sobek · CC BY 2.0 The landscape was shaped by ice. More than a hundred glaciers still cling to the ranges, and the broad, flat-floored valleys of the Matukituki, Dart, Rees and Wilkin rivers were scoured by much larger glaciers during the last ice age. Waterfalls spill from the valley walls, braided rivers spread across the valley floors, and above the bushline lie alpine meadows and tussock. Kea, the inquisitive mountain parrot of the South Island, are often seen around the huts and passes.
Did you know? The park covers about 356,000 hectares at the southern end of the Southern Alps.
15 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 islands lie in Palau's Southern Lagoon between Koror and Peleliu, and almost all are uninhabited. Hidden inside some of them are marine lakes, around 70 in all, bodies of seawater cut off from the lagoon except through fissures and tunnels in the old reef rock. The best known, Jellyfish Lake on Eil Malk, is home to millions of golden jellyfish that migrate across the lake every day; isolated for thousands of years, they have diverged from their relatives in the open lagoon. Several of the lakes are permanently layered, with oxygen-rich water at the top and a lifeless anoxic layer below, a condition rare among marine lakes anywhere.
Did you know? The site shelters over 746 fish species, more than 385 species of coral, at least 13 kinds of shark and seven species of giant clam.
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 Oceania?
- On our list, Great Barrier Reef (Australia) ranks first, followed by Kakadu National Park (Australia) and Fiordland National Park (New Zealand).
- Which country has the most UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in Oceania?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (10), New Zealand (3) and New Caledonia (1).
- How big is the Great Barrier Reef?
- It stretches more than 2,300 kilometres along the Queensland coast and covers about 344,000 square kilometres, with some 2,900 individual reefs and around 900 islands. It is the largest coral reef system in the world.
- Why are Franz Josef and Fox glaciers so close to the sea?
- Very high snowfall on the Southern Alps feeds them, and the mountains rise steeply from the coast, so the glaciers descend to only a few hundred metres above sea level, into temperate rainforest.
- Is Uluṟu a single rock?
- Uluṟu is a single sandstone formation that rises about 348 metres above the plain, with much more of it hidden underground. The nearby Kata Tjuṯa is a group of separate domes.
- How many UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty are on this list in Oceania?
- The list covers 15 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in 4 countries. Australia has the most, with 10.