Natural wonders of Oceania

Every wonder in the atlas that sits in Oceania, across 5 countries. This region grows as the atlas expands.

Aoraki / Mount Cook

Canterbury, South Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's highest peak — a snow-and-ice pyramid rising above glacier-fed turquoise lakes and the country's longest glacier, in the heart of the Southern Alps' greatest concentration of high mountains.

Mountain Oceania

Blue Mountains

New South Wales, Australia

A sandstone plateau slashed by vast eucalypt-filled valleys that shimmer blue with oil haze — home to towering cliffs, waterfalls, and a tree thought extinct for 90 million years.

Forest Oceania

Bora Bora

Society Islands, French Polynesia

The archetypal South Pacific paradise — a jagged volcanic peak ringed by a luminous turquoise lagoon and a protective coral reef, encircled by palm-fringed islets of white sand.

Island Oceania

Bungle Bungle Range

Purnululu, Kimberley, Western Australia

Hundreds of orange-and-black striped sandstone domes rising from the Kimberley outback — a beehive landscape unknown to the wider world until the 1980s.

Rock formation Oceania

Cradle Mountain

Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park, Central Highlands, northwest Tasmania, Australia

Tasmania's emblem: the jagged dolerite crown of Cradle Mountain rising above glacier-carved Dove Lake, in the heart of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, with wombats on the moors and golden fagus in autumn.

Mountain Oceania

Daintree Rainforest

Far North Queensland, Australia, north of Port Douglas

Australia's largest continuous block of tropical rainforest, often called the oldest on Earth, running down to the Coral Sea where the forest meets the Great Barrier Reef.

Forest Oceania

Doubtful Sound

Fiordland National Park, South Island, New Zealand

Fiordland's deep, silent wilderness fjord — larger, wilder, and far quieter than neighbouring Milford Sound, reached only by boat across Lake Manapouri and a mountain pass, its three dark arms walled by rainforest cliffs and roamed by dolphins, seals, and penguins.

Fjord Oceania

Franz Josef Glacier

Westland Tai Poutini National Park, South Island, New Zealand

A steep river of blue ice that pours from the Southern Alps almost into rainforest — one of only a handful of glaciers on Earth that descend so close to temperate forest and the sea, and one of the fastest-moving, tumbling from high snowfields to a valley of ferns.

Glacier Oceania

Great Barrier Reef

Queensland coast, Australia

The largest living structure on Earth — a 2,300-kilometre system of nearly 3,000 individual reefs and hundreds of islands off Queensland, so vast it can be seen from space, and among the most biodiverse places in the ocean.

Coral reef Oceania

Kakadu

Northern Territory, Australia

Australia's largest national park — a vast monsoonal landscape of floodplains, waterfalls, and stone country, alive with crocodiles and millions of birds, and holding some of the world's oldest rock art.

Wetland Oceania

Karijini National Park

Hamersley Range, Pilbara, Western Australia, about 1,400 km north of Perth

Western Australia's second-largest national park: more than 627,000 hectares of the Pilbara's Hamersley Range, where creeks plunge into 100-metre gorges cut through banded iron rock and hide waterfalls, ferny pools and narrow chasms.

Canyon Oceania

Lake Tekapo (Takapō)

Mackenzie Basin, Canterbury, South Island, New Zealand

A glacier-fed turquoise lake in the Mackenzie Basin, at the heart of the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve — milky blue water by day and some of the clearest night skies on Earth.

Lake Oceania

Lord Howe Island

Tasman Sea, about 570 km east of Port Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia

A crescent of volcanic island in the Tasman Sea, 11 km long, with the 875 m Mount Gower above a lagoon sheltered by the world's most southerly coral reef. A World Heritage Site since 1982, it takes only 400 visitors at a time.

Island Oceania

Milford Sound

Fiordland National Park, South Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's most famous fjord — sheer cliffs and the pyramid of Mitre Peak rising straight from dark water, laced with waterfalls fed by some of the highest rainfall on Earth, in the heart of Fiordland.

Fjord Oceania

Mount Yasur

Tanna Island, Vanuatu

One of the world's most accessible active volcanoes — a crater that has erupted almost continuously for centuries, flinging glowing lava bombs into the night sky just metres from its rim.

Volcano Oceania

Ningaloo Reef

Coral Coast, Western Australia

One of the world's largest fringing reefs — a coral wonderland that hugs the shore of Western Australia, where you can wade off the beach to snorkel with turtles, manta rays, and the giant whale shark.

Coral reef Oceania

Palau's Rock Islands

Rock Islands Southern Lagoon, Palau, Micronesia

Hundreds of emerald mushroom-shaped limestone islands scattered across a turquoise lagoon — a marine wonderland of hidden lakes, world-class reefs, and a lake full of harmless golden jellyfish.

Marine sanctuary Oceania

Rotorua Geothermal Field

Bay of Plenty, North Island, New Zealand

A landscape that steams, bubbles, and erupts — geysers, boiling mud pools, and mineral terraces in impossible colours, at the heart of Māori cultural life.

Hot spring Oceania

The Twelve Apostles

Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia

A row of towering limestone sea stacks rising from the Southern Ocean along Victoria's Great Ocean Road — sculpted from crumbling coastal cliffs by the relentless waves, and constantly, visibly changing.

Rock formation Oceania

Tongariro National Park

Central Plateau, North Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's oldest national park — a volcanic heartland of steaming craters, brilliant emerald lakes, and lava fields, crossed by one of the world's finest day hikes, and gifted to the nation by Māori in 1887 to keep it intact.

Volcano Oceania

Uluru

Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, Northern Territory, Australia

A colossal sandstone monolith rising abruptly from the flat red heart of Australia — glowing through fiery reds and oranges at sunrise and sunset, and a place of the deepest cultural significance to its Aboriginal custodians.

Rock formation Oceania

Whitehaven Beach

Whitsunday Island, Queensland, Australia

A seven-kilometre stretch of near-pure silica sand so white and fine it squeaks underfoot, curving along uninhabited Whitsunday Island, where at Hill Inlet the tide swirls the sand and shallows into shifting ribbons of white and turquoise.

Beach & coast Oceania