3 Amazing UNESCO Heritage Sites In Australia

19 Jul, 2022

Australia is more than the Sydney Opera House, the Great Barrier Reef, and cute koalas. One of the first nations to become a member of UNESCO back in 1947, nowadays it has no less than 19 sites listed in the famous heritage list, including the two acclaimed ones mentioned above.

However, from my traveling experience, I gather that simply making it to the list doesn't guarantee any international fame to a place. Not to mention that it is very much possible to visit a place without even knowing it is actually a UNESCO site. It happened to me many times in the past and I'm sure it happened to you too. Many people might claim they have only visited a few heritage sites in their lives because there is typically no plate attesting to the site's admission to the list. Truth is, that's what I thought too, till I went through the UNESCO list pen in hand and I came up to the conclusion that I've actually visited no less than 53 heritage sites so far.

If you’re staying at one of the hotels in Port Douglas, Cairns, or any other major city in Australia, you can easily visit many of the UNESCO Heritage sites. Following are three natural wonders you might have visited or plan to visit without even knowing they are part of the UNESCO list.

Kakadu National Park

Kakadu is one of the few locations with both natural and cultural value, making it one of the few mixed world heritage sites. The area has been continuously inhabited for the last 40,000 years. The first humans to set foot here were the hunter-gatherers of prehistoric times. However, once these lands were discovered, the ancient man apparently enjoyed them so much that they were never human-free again; the Aboriginal people still live here today, in this unique archaeological and ethnological reserve. Noteworthy are the cave paintings, stone carvings, and the rare or endemic species of plants and animals. Covering nearly 20,000 square kilometers of exceptional natural beauty, unique biodiversity, and a wide variety of landforms, Kakadu is one of the world's largest national parks.

Pied heron

Lotus flowers

Shark Bay

The protected area of Shark Bay includes Shark Bay Marine Park, Francois Peron National Park, Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve, Zuytdorp Nature Reserve, and numerous islands. The site comprises the largest and richest sea-grass beds in the world. It is also famous for its sea cow population and its stromatolites (colonies of algae that form hard, dome-shaped deposits). The region is a meeting point of three major climatic regions and it's a habitat for plant species that are unique and considered new to science. Five of Australia's 26 endangered mammal species are to be found here, as well as 35 percent of Australian bird species.

One of the earliest forms of life on earth is stromatolite.

Shell beach

Wet Tropics of Queensland

The Wet Tropics are renowned for their scenic panoramas of the rainforest canopy. From giant trees and ferns to rivers that carve through rugged gorges and cascade into freshwater swimming holes, they offer habitat to Australia’s greatest diversity of animals and plants. The site is actually a living record of the ecological and evolutionary processes that shaped the flora and fauna of Australia over the past 415 million years and is the oldest continuously surviving tropical rainforest on earth. The Wet Tropics also contain an almost complete record of the major stages in the evolution of plant life on Earth. In some coastal regions, the Wet Tropics share a boundary with the Great Barrier Reef.