Park of China
Cultural 10Natural 16Mixed 6
Oceania has 32 World Heritage Sites (10 cultural, 16 natural, 6 mixed) in 10 countries. Hover over or tap a dot to see its name; click a name in the list to show it on the map. Listed by year of inscription.
- Kakadu National Park Kakadu National Park, in Australia's Northern Territory, has been continuously inhabited for more than 40,000 years. Its rock paintings, engravings and archaeological sites record the way of life of people from prehistoric hunter-gatherers to the Aboriginal people who live there today. It also holds a range of ecosystems, from tidal flats and floodplains to plateaux, with many rare and endemic species.
- Great Barrier Reef The Great Barrier Reef lies off the north-east coast of Australia and holds the world's largest collection of coral reefs, with about 400 types of coral, 1,500 species of fish and 4,000 types of mollusc. It is also habitat for threatened species such as the dugong and green turtle.
- Willandra Lakes Region The Willandra Lakes Region in New South Wales preserves the fossil remains of Pleistocene lakes and sand formations, with archaeological evidence of human occupation from 45,000 to 60,000 years ago and well-preserved fossils of giant marsupials. It is a landmark for the study of human evolution in Australia.
- Tasmanian Wilderness The Tasmanian Wilderness is a group of parks and reserves covering over one million ha on the island of Tasmania, with steep gorges and a history of severe glaciation. It is one of the last large areas of temperate rainforest in the world, and remains in limestone caves show human occupation for more than 20,000 years.
- Lord Howe Island Group The Lord Howe Island Group, in the Tasman Sea off eastern Australia, is a remote chain of oceanic islands formed by volcanic activity more than 2,000 m under the sea. It has striking topography and many endemic species, especially birds.
- Gondwana Rainforests of Australia The Gondwana Rainforests of Australia comprise several protected areas mainly along the Great Escarpment on Australia's east coast, in New South Wales and Queensland. The site is internationally significant for its geological features around shield volcano craters and for its many rare and threatened rainforest species.
- Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park lies on the red sandy plain of central Australia and includes the monolith Uluru and the rock domes of Kata Tjuta to its west. These landforms are part of the traditional belief system of the Anangu, the park's traditional owners, one of the oldest human societies in the world.
- Wet Tropics of Queensland The Wet Tropics of Queensland stretch for about 450 km along Australia's north-east coast and consist largely of tropical rainforest. The area has a particularly varied range of plants, together with marsupials, songbirds and other rare and endangered animals and plants.
- Tongariro National Park Tongariro National Park, in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, was in 1993 the first property inscribed under the revised criteria for cultural landscapes. The volcanic mountains at its heart hold cultural and religious significance for the Maori people and symbolise their spiritual links with the land, and the park also has active volcanic landscapes and varied ecosystems.
- Te Wahipounamu – South West New Zealand Te Wahipounamu lies in the south-west of New Zealand's South Island, where successive glaciations have shaped fjords, rocky coasts, cliffs, lakes and waterfalls. Two-thirds of the area is covered with southern beech and podocarps, some of great age, and it shelters many rare birds.
- Shark Bay, Western Australia Shark Bay, with its islands and surrounding land, lies at the westernmost point of the Australian continent in Western Australia. It is recognised for the largest and richest seagrass beds in the world (4,800 km²), a dugong population, and stromatolites, among the oldest forms of life on Earth.
- K’gari K'gari lies just off Australia's east coast and, at 122 km long, is the largest sand island in the world. Inland from the beach are remnants of tall rainforest growing on sand and half of the world's perched freshwater dune lakes, set among shifting dunes.
- Australian Fossil Mammal Sites (Riversleigh / Naracoorte) This property comprises two fossil sites in eastern Australia, Riversleigh in the north (Queensland) and Naracoorte in the south (South Australia). They are among the world's ten greatest fossil sites and illustrate key stages in the evolution of Australia's distinctive fauna.
- Heard and McDonald Islands Heard Island and the McDonald Islands lie in the Southern Ocean, about 1,700 km from Antarctica and 4,100 km south-west of Perth. They are the only volcanically active subantarctic islands, allowing ongoing geomorphic and glacial processes to be observed, and are free of alien plants and animals and of human impact.
- Macquarie Island Macquarie Island, 34 km long and 5 km wide, is an oceanic island in the Southern Ocean about 1,500 km south-east of Tasmania. It is the exposed crest of the undersea Macquarie Ridge and the only place on Earth where rocks from the mantle, some 6 km below the ocean floor, are being actively exposed above sea level.
- East Rennell East Rennell makes up the southern third of Rennell Island, the southernmost of the Solomon Islands. Rennell, about 86 km long and 15 km wide, is the largest raised coral atoll in the world; the site shows island ecology in the western Pacific and is managed under customary tenure.
- New Zealand Sub-Antarctic Islands The New Zealand Sub-Antarctic Islands comprise five island groups, the Snares, Bounty Islands, Antipodes Islands, Auckland Islands and Campbell Island, in the Southern Ocean south-east of New Zealand. They are important breeding grounds for large numbers of seabirds, penguins and seals.
- Greater Blue Mountains Area The Greater Blue Mountains Area in New South Wales covers 1.03 million ha of sandstone plateaux, escarpments and gorges under temperate eucalypt forest, in eight protected areas. It has 91 eucalypt taxa and illustrates the evolution and diversification of eucalypts in isolation after the breakup of Gondwana.
- Purnululu National Park Purnululu National Park, covering 239,723 ha, is in Western Australia. Its Bungle Bungle Range is Devonian quartz sandstone eroded over some 20 million years into beehive-shaped towers, banded by dark cyanobacterial crust, and is an outstanding example of cone karst.
- Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens The Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens in Melbourne were designed by Joseph Reed for the international exhibitions of 1880 and 1888. The building combines Byzantine, Romanesque, Lombardic and Italian Renaissance elements and is a surviving example of the international exhibition movement of 1851-1915.
- Sydney Opera House The Sydney Opera House stands at the tip of a peninsula in Sydney Harbour. Opened in 1973, it has three groups of interlocking vaulted shells roofing two main halls and a restaurant, set on a large platform. It is regarded as a major 20th-century architectural work, innovative in both form and structural design.
- Chief Roi Mata’s Domain Chief Roi Mata's Domain consists of three early 17th-century sites on the islands of Efate, Lelepa and Artok in Vanuatu, associated with the life and burial of the last paramount chief Roi Mata. It is the first site in Vanuatu to be inscribed.
- Kuk Early Agricultural Site Kuk Early Agricultural Site is a 116-hectare area of swamp in the western highlands of Papua New Guinea at about 1,500 m. Excavation shows that people reclaimed wetland for cultivation here from very early times, making it important evidence for the independent development of agriculture.
- Australian Convict Sites The property consists of eleven penal sites spread across Australia, from Fremantle in Western Australia to the Sydney area, Tasmania and Norfolk Island. Around 166,000 men, women and children were transported to the Australian colonies between 1787 and 1868, and the sites illustrate this large-scale convict system.
- Phoenix Islands Protected Area The Phoenix Islands Protected Area lies in the central South Pacific and belongs to Kiribati. Covering about 408,250 sq km of the Phoenix Island Group and surrounding ocean, it is one of the world's largest marine protected areas and conserves coral reefs, seamounts and largely intact ocean ecosystems.
- Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands was used by the United States for nuclear tests after the Second World War, following the relocation of its inhabitants. The site includes ships sunk in the lagoon, test installations and blast remains, and bears witness to the beginning of the nuclear age and the early Cold War.
- Ningaloo Coast The Ningaloo Coast, on Australia's remote west coast, covers 604,500 ha of land and sea and includes one of the longest near-shore reefs in the world. On land it has a karst system with caves and underground watercourses; whale sharks gather there each year, and sea turtles and many other marine species are found.
- Rock Islands Southern Lagoon Rock Islands Southern Lagoon in Palau comprises 445 uninhabited limestone islands, many with mushroom-like shapes, set in turquoise lagoons among coral reefs. It supports rich marine life and also holds remains of former settlements.
- Levuka Historical Port Town Levuka, on the shore of Ovalau island, was the first colonial capital of Fiji, ceded to Britain in 1874. From the early 19th century Americans and Europeans built warehouses, stores, port facilities, residences and religious, educational and social institutions around existing villages, giving the town its low waterfront line of buildings.
- Nan Madol: Ceremonial Centre of Eastern Micronesia Nan Madol is a series of more than 100 islets off the south-east coast of Pohnpei in Micronesia, built with walls of basalt and coral boulders. They hold the remains of stone palaces, temples, tombs and residential areas built between 1200 and 1500 CE, the ceremonial centre of the Saudeleur dynasty.
- Budj Bim Cultural Landscape The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape lies in the traditional Country of the Gunditjmara people in Victoria, south-eastern Australia. The Gunditjmara built channels, weirs and dams on the Budj Bim lava flows to trap and harvest short-finned eel, creating one of the world's most extensive and oldest aquaculture systems, used for some six millennia.
- Murujuga Cultural Landscape Murujuga is a land and seascape in north-western Western Australia, covering the Burrup Peninsula, the Dampier Archipelago, surrounding waters and a submerged landscape. It reflects more than 50,000 years of care by the Ngarda-Ngarli under Traditional Law and holds deep cultural and spiritual significance.