Melbourne travel guide

Top 10 sights in Melbourne

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Andrew Lukaris · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Carlton Gardens

   Twenty-six hectares of Victorian garden laid out for the international exhibition of 1880. With the Royal Exhibition Building at its centre — where Australia's first parliament sat in 1901 — it became the country's first World Heritage listing in 2004.

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   National Gallery of Victoria

   Founded in 1861, the oldest and most visited art museum in Australia, and split across two buildings. The St Kilda Road site has the water wall you walk through and Leonard French's stained-glass ceiling over the Great Hall, which people lie on the floor to look at.

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3. 

   3© Donaldytong · CC BY-SA 3.0

   St Patrick's Cathedral

   The Catholic cathedral of Melbourne, built in bluestone between 1858 and 1939 and the tallest church in Australia. Its spires were added seventy years after the walls, to the original design.

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4. 

   4© Commander Keane · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Melbourne Zoo

   The oldest zoo in Australia, opened in 1862 in Royal Park, and among the oldest anywhere. It has been rebuilt around walk-through enclosures, breeds the orange-bellied parrot for release, and runs open-air concerts on summer evenings.

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   Melbourne Museum

   A museum opened in 2000 in the Carlton Gardens, covering natural and cultural history. Phar Lap, the racehorse that carried the country through the Depression, is here, along with a gallery of living forest under glass.

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   Federation Square

   A civic square opened in 2002 on a deck over the railway lines, faced in sandstone, zinc and glass in a pattern nobody agreed about. It holds the Ian Potter Centre, which shows Australian art including a large First Nations collection.

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   Shrine of Remembrance

   A war memorial of 1934 built as a stepped classical monument on a rise above the city. It is designed so that at eleven o'clock on the eleventh of November a shaft of sunlight crosses the stone at its centre.

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8. 

   8© Adam.J.W.C. · CC BY-SA 2.5

   St Paul's Cathedral

   Anglican cathedral of Melbourne, built from 1880 by William Butterfield in Gothic Revival. Its three spires were added in 1932 and rise ninety-nine metres.

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9. 

   9© CloudSurfer at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Cooks' Cottage

   The Yorkshire cottage of James Cook's parents, built in 1755, taken apart into two hundred and fifty-three cases and shipped to Melbourne in 1934. Whether Cook himself ever lived in it is disputed; that he visited his parents there is not.

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10. 

    10© Shkuru Afshar · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Melbourne Aquarium

    An aquarium on the Yarra in the centre of Melbourne, given over to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Its penguin enclosure is kept below freezing, with king and gentoo penguins bred on site.

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1. 

   1© MusikAnimal · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Luna Park

   An amusement park on the St Kilda foreshore that opened in 1912 and is entered through the mouth of a large moon face. Its Scenic Railway of the same year is the oldest roller coaster still running anywhere, and a brakeman rides standing between the cars.

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   HMVS Cerberus

   An iron warship of 1871, the first in the world built with a central armoured breastwork and no sails, and the last of her type left. She was scuttled off Black Rock as a breakwater in 1926 and is slowly collapsing.

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3. 

   3© Charlie Brewer from Sydney, Australia · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Old Melbourne Gaol

   A prison of 1842 that held and hanged a hundred and thirty-three people before closing in 1929, among them the bushranger Ned Kelly in 1880. His death mask and the gallows are still in the building.

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4. 

   4© AussQVMarks · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Queen Victoria Market

   A market trading on the same site since 1878, seven hectares of sheds selling produce, meat and everything else, and the largest open-air market in the southern hemisphere. Part of it stands over the city's first cemetery.

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5. 

   5© Sgroey · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Hoddle Grid

   The grid of streets that makes central Melbourne, set out by the surveyor Robert Hoddle in 1837 — a rectangle of about one and a half kilometres by eight hundred metres, laid at an angle to everything around it. The narrow lanes between the main streets now hold the bars.

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6. 

   6© Sgroey · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Chinatown

   A Chinese quarter on Little Bourke Street established during the gold rush of the 1850s, and the longest continuously occupied Chinese settlement in the western world. Its arches and lanes still hold the older restaurants.

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7. 

   7© Nick carson at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Heide Museum of Modern Art

   A former dairy farm at Bulleen bought in 1934 by John and Sunday Reed, who housed and fed the painters who changed Australian art. It opened as a museum in 1981 and keeps their two houses, a garden and a sculpture park.

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8. 

   8© Nick-D · CC BY-SA 3.0

   HMAS Castlemaine

   One of sixty Bathurst-class corvettes built during the Second World War. Launched in 1941 and commissioned the following year, she served in Australian, New Guinea and Timor waters before being placed in reserve in 1945, and is preserved at Williamstown as a museum ship.

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   Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre

   A museum founded in 1984 by survivors who had settled in Melbourne, which took in more Holocaust survivors per head than any city outside Israel. It combines testimony, teaching and research, and was rebuilt on the same site recently.

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10. 

    10© Sgroey · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Museums Victoria

    The body that runs Melbourne Museum, the Immigration Museum, Scienceworks and the Royal Exhibition Building, holding some seventeen million items between them — the largest museum collection in the southern hemisphere.

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