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Townsville is blessed with a golden, 2-km (1-mile) beach that stretches along the city’s northern edge. The beach, with its associated pools, water park, and adjacent parklands, is hugely popular with the locals, especially over school holidays and summer.
This palm-flanked stretch of sand—lined with jogging tracks and cycleways, picnic-friendly parklands, and hip beachfront bars—has two swimming enclosures and a long pier perfect for fishing. The beach and its permanent swimming enclosure, Strand Rock Pool, are fitted with temporary nets during stinger season, November through May. There's also a free, kid-friendly Strand Water Park. Amenities: food and drink; lifeguards; toilets. Best for: swimming.
Set on 27 acres of bushland, this eco-friendly, family-run wildlife sanctuary shelters koalas, wombats, dingoes, wallabies, endangered bilbies, snakes, crocodiles, meerkats, a Burmese python, lizards, and numerous native birds. The sanctuary has daily free-flight birds of prey shows, crocodile and cassowary feedings, and venomous snake presentations. Visitors can hand-feed turtles at the billabong, meet the meerkats, snap a selfie with a koala, or have their photo taken holding a lizard, a snake, or a baby croc. Thrill-seekers can book a personal croc-feeding, with or without souvenir photo.
Offering shade and serenity less than a mile from the CBD, Townsville's colonial-era Queens Gardens occupies 10 verdant acres at the base of Castle Hill. Bordered by frangipani (plumeria) and towering Moreton Bay fig trees, whose unique dangling roots veil the entry to the grounds, the gardens are a wonderful place to picnic, stroll, or amuse the kids. There are play areas, a hedge maze, formal rose garden, fountains, and a lovely rain forest walk. A compact aviary houses bright-plumed peacocks, lorikeets, and sulfur-crested cockatoos.
Centuries-old relics from the HMS Pandora (the ship sent by the British Admiralty to capture the mutinous Bounty crew), which sank in 1791 carrying 14 crew members of Captain Bligh's infamous ship, are among the exhibits at this repository of the region's maritime, natural, and Indigenous history. There's a fun introduction to North Queensland's culture and lifestyle, a shipwreck exhibit, and the ecology-focused Enchanted Rainforest. Displays of tropical wildlife, dinosaur fossils, local corals, and deep-sea creatures round out a diverse public collection.
Spot wallabies, echidnas, goannas, and hundreds of bird species at this terrific wetlands conservation park crisscrossed by walking and biking trails, and dotted with bird blinds and a wildlife-viewing tower. You can take the easy, hour-long Forest Walk to see kingfishers and honey-eaters, the Pallarenda to Tegoora Rock circuit for wetlands overviews, or several other walking and biking trails (with estimated walk times ranging from 30 minutes to five hours). The 5-km (3-mile), two-plus-hour-long trail from Bald Rock to Mount Marlow is worth the uphill trek for the glorious regional panorama at the summit. Most trails start from Bald Rock parking lot, 7 km (4½ miles) from the park entrance on unpaved roads.
Surrounding the highest sheer-drop waterfall in Australia is glorious Girringun National Park, in which ancient rain forests accessible via scenic walking trails shelter rare plants and animals that include the endangered southern cassowary, platypus, and musky rat-kangaroo. You might also spot eastern water dragons, saw-shelled turtles, and crocodiles here. Around two hours' drive north of Townsville, the park is the start of the Wet Tropics Great Walk, suitable for experienced hikers. For day-trippers, there are two spectacular lookouts and some scenic short walks, such as the 45-minute Banggurru circuit along Stony Creek's bank, or the steeper, two-hour walk to the base of the falls.
