Top Things To See and Do in Adelaide, Australia

Follow your nose through the 80 stalls overflowing with fresh fruit and veg, gourmet meat goods, artisanal cheeses, quality coffee and freshly baked pastries, and your senses will quickly reveal why the Adelaide Central Market is South Australia’s most visited attraction, luring more than eight million visitors through its doors every year.

This pedestrian mall is the beating heart of the South Australian capital, loaded with glitzy modern shopping centres alongside historic Italianate arcades. Keep an eye out for the much-loved pieces of public art — the four-metre-tall ‘Malls Balls’ and the pod of bronze pigs scavenging in a rubbish bin — as well as the iconic ‘Beehive Corner’, an ornate Neo-gothic building that houses Adelaide institution Haigh’s Chocolates.

With evidence of habitation dating back more than 60,000 years, Indigenous Australians maintain the oldest living culture on earth — and this 150-year-old museum curates the the world’s largest collection of Indigenous Australian cultural artefacts among its enormous collection of four million objects and specimens. Next door on North Terrace, the Art Gallery of South Australia is also worth a visit.

Australia’s second-oldest zoo has welcomed generations of South Australians through its doors since opening to the public in 1883, these days home to 2500 creatures across 250 species. The charity that operates Adelaide Zoo — Zoos SA — also runs the open-range Monarto Zoo, featuring a walk-in lion experience, drive-through cheetah habitat and the country’s biggest herd of giraffes.