Experience the best of Townsville

Townsville is the largest city in tropical north Queensland, founded in 1864 beside Cleveland Bay and named after the merchant Robert Towns. Castle Hill, a pink granite monolith about 286 metres high, rises right behind the centre, and tracks and a road climb to a lookout over the city, the bay and Magnetic Island. Old stone and iron-lace buildings stand along Flinders Street.

The Strand, a palm-fringed promenade, has a swimming enclosure and an ocean rockpool. Magnetic Island, about twenty minutes away by ferry, has koalas in its bushland, bays for snorkelling and the Forts Walk past wartime ruins. The Museum of Tropical Queensland displays relics from HMS Pandora, wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef in 1791, and divers head out to the wreck of the steamship Yongala, lost in a cyclone in 1911.

Barramundi, prawns and mud crabs are common on menus, and tropical fruit grows on the surrounding plain. Townsville is drier than the rainforest coast farther north, so the sun shines most of the year.