Queensland is the ideal destination to get close to unique and spectacular nature. Home to 450 national parks and an abundant marine park that stretches along the coastline, it’s no surprise Queensland is a world leader in nature based holidays.

Queensland is also blessed with five World Heritage sites (detailed below) which attract visitors from all over the world. World heritage sites are those places, which are considered the most outstanding natural and cultural heritage areas of the world.

Sites selected for World Heritage are inscribed on the World Heritage List only after carefully assessing whether they represent the best example of cultural and natural heritage on earth.

Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef, just the name conjures up images of spectacular reefs teeming with incredible and colourful marine life. Nowhere else is nature so spectacular or creative than in the canyons and gardens of the Great Barrier Reef. Even the numbers are awesome: nearly 3,000 individual reefs spread over 344,000 square kilometres, supporting more than 6,600 species of flora and fauna including 1,500 species of fish, 4,000 species of molluscs and 400 types of coral not to mention some 900 cays and islands.. The Great Barrier Reef is now the largest World Heritage-listed area in existence. Snorkelling, diving and particularly learning to dive on the Great Barrier Reef is, quite simply, the adventure of a lifetime.

The Wet Tropics

Although the Great Barrier Reef stretches more than 2,000km along the Queensland coastline, it is only at Cape Tribulation, just north of Port Douglas that the reefs come right to the shore and meet the tropical rainforests of the Wet Tropics. These rainforests are the oldest continually surviving tropical rainforests on earth with examples of plant species that existed 150 million years ago. In the Wet Tropics you will be dwarfed by king ferns and giant bull kauri pines, or marvel at the smaller intricate ferns and mosses that adorn rainforest walking tracks.

Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves

High up in the hinterland of the Gold Coast is a series of ridges - some reaching more than 1,100m - their sheer escarpments giving way to lush green valleys, and the most outstanding sections of environment now preserved under World Heritage protection as a region identified as the Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves. The reserves contain the Lamington National Park, which features 15,000 year-old Antarctic beech trees and provides food and shelter for a huge array of sub-tropical birdlife, reptiles, frogs and mammals and with the self-guided walking tracks throughout visitors are sure to experience a close encounters of a natural kind.

Fraser Island

Called K'gari by its Aboriginal inhabitants, Fraser Island is renowned as the largest sand island in the world. The 184,000 hectare island is not only a natural paradise but was also popular from the earliest time with Aboriginal people.

Visitors to the island these days are drawn to its superb natural beauty with long uninterrupted white beaches and cliffs of coloured sands. Surprisingly, this sand island is also home to rainforests and 40 fresh water lakes. Birds are the most abundant form of animal life seen on the island with over 350 species of birds recorded and the dingo population on Fraser Island is regarded as one of the purest strain of dingo remaining in Australia. August to October however is the highlight of nature’s calendar with the migration of the humpback whales where visitors enjoy the rare opportunity to watch mothers and calves at play.

Fossil Fields

Not many visitors to Australia would expect to see the relics that can be found in the Fossil Mammal Sites around Riversleigh, in Queensland’s outback. The site has captured and preserved a snapshot of an entire rainforest environment dating back between 25-30 million years. The extensive fossil deposits span a record of mammal evolution of at least 20 million years. Only in one or two places on the surface of our planet, in the course of the last three thousand million years, have conditions been just right to preserve anything like a representative sample of the species living at any particular time and Riversleigh is one of those blessed places