Port Douglas is the stylish, laid-back face of tropical Australia: a small, sophisticated town where the rainforest runs down to the sea and where, in a single day, you can dive the Great Barrier Reef in the morning and walk through the world's oldest tropical rainforest in the afternoon. It's one of the very few places on the planet where two World Heritage wonders — the reef and the Wet Tropics rainforest — meet.
Unlike the backpacker buzz of Cairns, 'Port' (as locals call it) has a chicer, calmer feel: Macrossan Street with its boutiques and restaurants, the timber chapel of St Mary's by the Sea looking out to sea, the Sunday market under giant fig trees, and above all Four Mile Beach, four kilometres of golden sand lined with palm trees. The best reef boats leave from its harbour, including those heading to the nearby Low Isles, ideal for families.
This guide covers the best of Port Douglas with a practical eye: how to get to the reef and the Low Isles, how to visit Mossman Gorge and the Daintree rainforest, where to watch the sunset, when to go to avoid jellyfish season, what everything costs in Australian dollars and how to get around. A perfect destination for combining world-class nature with good food and rest.
The region is the Country of the Kuku Yalanji (rainforest people, to the north and west) and the Yirrganydji (from the coast towards Cairns), whose connection to this land goes back tens of thousands of years. The European town was born from gold: after the discovery on the Hodgkinson River goldfields (1876), explorer Christie Palmerston and Aboriginal guides opened the route down from the tableland in 1877, the 'Bump Track', and Port Douglas grew up as an export port. Cyclones, the gold boom and bust, sugar cane and, finally, tourism shaped its history. It's all on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The state of sunshine and the tropics: land of dozens of Aboriginal nations, born as the Moreton Bay penal settlement in 1824, separated from New South Wales in 1859 and shaped by sugar cane, wool and mining. It is home to the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree Rainforest, two World Heritage Sites.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before there was a port, a single hotel or a street, this strip of coast where the rainforest meets the sea had owners going back tens of thousands of years. The Port Douglas region is Country of two peoples: the Kuku Yalanji, rainforest people whose territory stretches from the Mowbray River north to Cooktown and west to the Palmer River, and the Yirrganydji, a coastal people whose land runs from the Mowbray south towards Cairns. The Kuku Yalanji called the area 'Jabulkanji'.
They are rainforest people, with a connection to this land that archaeological research places among the oldest human occupations in Australia. They lived off an extraordinarily rich land: the Wet Tropics rainforest, now a World Heritage Site, gave them fruit, yams, medicinal plants, fibres and game, while the sea, rivers and mangroves provided fish, shellfish and turtles. That knowledge of the forest, passed down over thousands of years, includes the safe use of plants that are toxic when raw and that they learned to process.
The Kuku Yalanji had, and still have, their Dreamings (the ancestral stories that explain the origin of the mountains, the rivers and the laws) and sacred sites across the region, many of them around Mossman Gorge and the Daintree. That presence is not a thing of the past: today the Kuku Yalanji community runs the Mossman Gorge Centre and offers the 'Dreamtime Walks', where they share their living culture, their plants and their stories with visitors. Walking through the rainforest with its Traditional Owners is the deepest way to understand this place.
Like so many towns in North Queensland, the European town was born of the glitter of gold. In 1876 the explorer James Venture Mulligan discovered gold on the Hodgkinson River field, on the tableland to the west. Thousands of prospectors rushed there, and all those people and all that gold needed a port on the coast for supplies and exports. So began the race to find and open the best route down the mountain.
In 1877 the explorer Christie Palmerston, along with others and with the help of local Aboriginal guides, opened a route from the goldfields to a point on the coast called Island Point. That track, which climbed up and down the rainforest escarpment, became famous as the 'Bump Track'. In June 1877, merchants from Cooktown arrived by sea on the steamer SS Corea and built a wharf and storehouses. When the colonial official (Crown Ranger Morgan) arrived on 16 June 1877, he found a tent town of prospectors and laid out a street along the shore: Port Douglas was born, named after John Douglas, Premier of Queensland.
The town grew at a dizzying pace. By 1878 it already had around 400 residents, 18 licensed hotels and all the trades and services of a booming port. The discovery of tin at Wild River in 1880 gave it another boost. For a few years Port Douglas was the prosperous, bustling port of the north, with ships coming and going loaded with gold, supplies and people. It seemed destined to become the region's great city.
Port Douglas's fate was changed by a decision and a storm. The decision was about the railway. The Bump Track, the route that kept the port alive, was a difficult trail, and the severe wet season of 1882 left it almost impassable. When the time came to build the railway linking the tableland with the coast (the line every rival port wanted), the authorities chose Cairns, not Port Douglas, as the terminus. The railway to Kuranda opened in 1891 and reached Mareeba in 1893.
It was a fatal blow. With the railway, Cairns captured the trade in gold, sugar cane and produce from the tableland, and Port Douglas lost its reason for being a port. People began to leave, the hotels closed and the town slipped into a long decline. All that remained of the would-be capital was a quiet little settlement surviving on sugar cane, fishing and little else.
The second blow came from nature. The tropical north is cyclone country, and Port Douglas was hit by several devastating ones in 1911, 1920 and 1934. The worst was the cyclone of March 1911, which destroyed or badly damaged almost every building in town: it is said that only seven homes were left standing. Many residents moved to nearby Mossman. For much of the 20th century Port Douglas was a sleepy, forgotten town of a few hundred people, its golden beaches almost deserted and its old glory as a port reduced to a memory. Nothing suggested it would ever shine again.
Port Douglas's revival came suddenly in the 1980s, and it has a controversial name attached: Christopher Skase. This businessman funded the construction of the luxurious Sheraton Mirage Resort, which opened in the late 80s and put Port Douglas on the map of high-end international tourism. Suddenly that sleepy town discovered it had everything the world was looking for: a spectacular beach (Four Mile Beach), the Great Barrier Reef a short boat ride away and the oldest tropical rainforest on the planet a short drive away. (Skase would later become caught up in a notorious financial scandal and flee the country, but the tourism boom was already under way.)
From then on, Port Douglas reinvented itself as the elegant, relaxed face of the tropical north, a sophisticated counterpoint to the backpacker buzz of Cairns. Resorts, boutiques and good restaurants arrived on Macrossan Street, the marina filled with boats heading out to the reef, and the town made the most of its unique position between two World Heritage Sites: the Great Barrier Reef (listed in 1981) and the Wet Tropics of Queensland (1988).
Today Port Douglas lives on nature and leisure tourism: trips to the Low Isles and the outer reef, excursions to Mossman Gorge and the Daintree, sunsets at Rex Smeal Park, the Sunday market and the food scene. It is also a place where First Nations culture is regaining its rightful place, with the Kuku Yalanji community leading the Mossman Gorge experience.
The challenge today is the same for the whole north: looking after the two treasures that sustain it. The Great Barrier Reef faces coral bleaching and climate change, and cyclones remain a recurring threat. The story of Port Douglas, from gold and the Bump Track to coral and rainforest, by way of ruin and revival, is that of a town that lost almost everything and then found its true gold in the nature that surrounds it.
