Adelaide is Australia's most planned and laid-back city, and one of its most underrated. Laid out in 1836 on a perfect grid surrounded by a continuous ring of parkland (the Park Lands), it's compact, green and elegant, with sandstone buildings, wide squares and a food and festival scene that earned it the nickname '20-minute city': everything is close by. It's the capital of South Australia and the gateway to the country's best wine regions.
Here you'll find the largest undercover market in the Southern Hemisphere (the Adelaide Central Market, with more than 70 stalls), an iconic stadium where you can walk across the roof (the Adelaide Oval RoofClimb), free museums and galleries along elegant North Terrace, and a culture of coffee, wine and live music that explodes every summer during the 'Mad March' festival season. Glenelg beach is 25 minutes away by tram; the Adelaide Hills, 20 minutes by car.
This is the land of the Kaurna people, who called this plain Tarntanya, 'the place of the red kangaroo', and cared for it with fire for hundreds of generations. Adelaide was founded as a free colony, with no convicts, following Wakefield's colonial experiment, and that unusual history (a designed city, religious freedom, the 'City of Churches') can still be felt today. With friendlier prices than Sydney or Melbourne and the wineries of the Barossa and McLaren Vale just around the corner, Adelaide is a destination that grows on you the more time you give it.
Adelaide stands on Tarntanya, 'the place of the red kangaroo', at the heart of the Country of the Kaurna people, who managed this plain with careful burning for hundreds of generations. In 1836 it was founded as the capital of the only Australian colony designed to be free (no convicts), following the ideas of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and it was Colonel William Light who designed its famous grid surrounded by parkland. A city of religious freedom and churches, it grew on wheat, copper and wine. The full story, from the Kaurna Dreaming to today's festival-loving Adelaide, is on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The only Australian colony founded without convicts: established in 1836 as an experiment in free, planned settlement on the land of the Kaurna people. Home to Adelaide, the city of churches and festivals, to Barossa Valley Shiraz and to a red outback that hides the opal of Coober Pedy.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
When Colonel William Light first looked out over the plain where he would lay out Adelaide, in 1836, he saw a landscape that reminded him of an English park: open grassland, dotted with trees, crossed by a river. What he didn't understand (what almost no settler understood) is that this 'park' wasn't natural. It was a masterpiece of ecological engineering, shaped by the Kaurna people over hundreds of generations through careful burning that kept the land open and fertile.
This plain between the Mount Lofty hills and Gulf St Vincent is Tarntanya, 'the place of the red kangaroo', the heart of Kaurna Country. The Kaurna, whom the settlers sometimes called the 'Adelaide tribe', probably numbered around 300 people in the immediate area. They were organised in family groups that moved with the seasons between the coast, the Karrawirra Parri river (today's Torrens) and the hills. Their lives were woven into the Dreaming and into sacred sites, along with a deep knowledge of water, plants and animals.
That knowledge included the fire management that gave the plain its meadow-like look, which so appealed to settlers looking for land that was easy to plough. The irony is bitter: what made Adelaide an ideal spot for a colonial city was exactly the result of Kaurna care for the land. For more than a century, the city built on Tarntanya would erase the people who had made it possible.
Adelaide wasn't born like the rest of colonial Australia. Sydney, Hobart and Brisbane began as penal colonies populated by convicts. South Australia, by contrast, was designed as an experiment: the continent's second free colony and the first trial of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theories of 'systematic colonisation'.
The idea was set out in the South Australia Act of 1834, after a petition from reformers such as Robert Gouger. Land would be sold at a price that made immigrants work for a while before they could buy it. The money would pay the passage of more free settlers and build a society of small landowners, free of the stain of convictism. The colony filled with free families, many also drawn by the promise of religious freedom: Dissenters, German Lutherans fleeing persecution, Methodists. That's where the nickname Adelaide would carry for decades comes from: 'the city of churches'.
Physical settlement began when the first British colonists arrived in February 1836, and the colonial government was formally proclaimed on 28 December 1836, a date still celebrated in SA as Proclamation Day. The city was named Adelaide after Queen Adelaide, wife of William IV. On paper, it was a shining ideal of freedom and order. In practice, that ideal didn't include the Kaurna. Their rights to the land were recognised in theory in the founding Letters Patent but were never respected.
If one thing sets Adelaide apart from every other Australian city, it's the street plan. Colonel William Light, the colony's first Surveyor-General, designed the centre with an originality that is now on the national heritage list. It's a perfect grid of wide streets and generous squares, split by the River Torrens into the city and North Adelaide. And, in his great stroke of genius, it's completely surrounded by a continuous ring of parkland, the Park Lands. This is the famous 'Light's Vision'.
Light chose the site despite pressure to put the capital on the coast, convinced that the plain beside the Torrens offered water, good soil and room to grow. He fell ill and died a few years later, in 1839, but his plan survived intact and gave Adelaide its lasting character: a compact, green, orderly city where you're never far from a park. Adelaideans still honour him with a lookout named after him in North Adelaide, pointing towards the grid he imagined.
In the middle of that grid, a little-known episode left a huge mark. In October 1838, two German Lutheran missionaries, Christian Teichelmann and Clamor Schürmann, arrived in the colony and set about learning and documenting the Kaurna language. In December 1839 they opened a school at Piltawodli, in the western Park Lands, where Kaurna children learned to read and write in their own language. Their vocabulary of more than 2,000 words (the largest recorded at the time) would become the key to reviving the language a century and a half later.
For the Kaurna, the founding of Adelaide was a catastrophe. They had already been hit by a smallpox epidemic that spread from the east in the early 1830s, before the settlers even arrived. Then they watched as the city and farms took over their lands, cut off their access to water and sacred sites, and banned their practices. Assimilation policies, the closure of the Piltawodli mission in 1845 and displacement gradually dismantled Kaurna life on the plain. By the late 19th century, colonial society considered 'extinct' a people who were in fact still alive: scattered, but resilient.
Meanwhile, the colony prospered. Wheat from the plain, wool and, above all, copper gave South Australia a solid economic base. The copper came from the mines at Kapunda (1842) and Burra (1845), worked by Cornish miners, and earned the colony the nickname 'the Copper Kingdom'. German immigrants planted vineyards in the nearby Barossa Valley, sowing the seed of what would become the country's great wine region. Adelaide filled with sandstone buildings, churches and institutes, and with a civic culture proud of being 'the respectable colony', without the penal past of its neighbours.
The 20th century brought industry (carmaker Holden set up there after the war), waves of European immigrants (Italians, Greeks) who enriched its food, and a progressive identity: South Australia led the way in giving women the vote (1894) and in social reform. Adelaide grew, but it kept its human scale and Light's plan.
Today's Adelaide is going through a double revival. One is cultural. Since the 1980s, a remarkable collaboration between linguists and the Kaurna community has rebuilt the language from those vocabularies by Teichelmann and Schürmann. Today Kaurna is taught and heard in Welcome to Country ceremonies. It appears in dual place names (the river is officially Karrawirra Parri / Torrens), and it's a source of pride. The people the colony wrote off as vanished are speaking their language again and becoming visible in the city built on their Tarntanya.
The other revival is the festivals. Every southern summer, Adelaide turns into 'Mad March'. The Adelaide Fringe (the second-largest arts festival in the world), the Adelaide Festival, WOMADelaide and an explosion of music, theatre and street food take over the city. The rest of the year, the wine, café and small-bar scene in Peel Street, Leigh Street and the East End keeps alive a food reputation that surprises anyone who underestimates the place.
Compact, green, cultured and full of flavour, Adelaide is also the best base for exploring South Australia. Just a short trip away are the wineries of the Barossa, McLaren Vale and the Adelaide Hills, the wildlife of Kangaroo Island and the ancient landscapes of the Flinders Ranges. Almost two centuries on, the city Light designed still keeps the promise of its plan: a place on a human scale, surrounded by parks, where history (Kaurna, colonial and contemporary) can be read on every corner.
