The Sunshine Coast is the most relaxed, family-friendly side of the Queensland sun: 60 kilometres of golden beaches north of Brisbane, without the Gold Coast's skyscrapers, with an unhurried pace, seafront cafés and a green hinterland of volcanic mountains, waterfalls and charming villages. It's the ideal destination if you're after sun, beach and nature without the bustle of the big coastal cities.
On the coast, towns such as Mooloolaba, Maroochydore and Caloundra offer patrolled beaches, seafront promenades, the SEA LIFE aquarium and an ever-improving food scene. Inland, the hinterland surprises with Montville and Maleny, their lookouts over the valley, their waterfalls and gardens, and above all with the Glass House Mountains, a group of rugged volcanic peaks more than 25 million years old, sacred to the Kabi Kabi people. And in Beerwah you'll find the world-famous Australia Zoo, created by Steve Irwin, 'the Crocodile Hunter'. All of this, with Noosa as the jewel at its northern end.
This guide covers the Sunshine Coast with a practical eye: how to get there from Brisbane and the region's airport, what to see without missing the best beaches, Australia Zoo or the hinterland, how much admission and activities cost (in Australian dollars, verified in July 2026) and where to eat and sleep to suit your budget. We also tell its story: that of the Kabi Kabi (Gubbi Gubbi) people, custodians of this land for tens of thousands of years and hosts of the great Bunya Festival, and that of the white settlers who came for timber and sugar cane.
The Sunshine Coast is Country of the Kabi Kabi (Gubbi Gubbi) people, who have lived on this coast, its rivers and its mountains for tens of thousands of years (there is evidence going back as far as 30.000 years). They were one of the host peoples of the great Bunya Festival, which brought many nations together in the mountains inland. The Glass House Mountains were named by Captain Cook in 1770; European settlers arrived in the mid-19th century looking for cedar and other timbers, and later grew sugar cane and fruit, founding towns such as Nambour and Maroochydore. In the 20th century the region became the beach-and-nature destination it is today. In 2024, the Federal Court recognised Kabi Kabi native title over much of the Sunshine Coast. Its full story is told on the 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.
Read the history of Queensland →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the fashionable beaches and resorts, the Sunshine Coast was —and still is— Country of the Kabi Kabi people, also spelled Gubbi Gubbi, one of the Aboriginal nations of south-east Queensland. Their territory took in this coast, its rivers, its lakes and the mountains of the hinterland, and their presence goes back tens of thousands of years: archaeological evidence suggests Aboriginal occupation of the region from around 30,000 years ago, which makes this landscape one of the oldest continuously inhabited in Australia.
Kabi Kabi life was closely tied to the abundance of the land around them. On the coast and in the estuaries they gathered shellfish and fished; in the forest they hunted and collected fruit, roots and honey; and they moved with the seasons, following the resources. Many place names in the region still carry roots from their language: Maroochydore, for example, comes from a word linked to the red-beaked black swans ('the place of the red beaks'), and Mooloolaba and Caloundra also have Aboriginal origins.
For the Kabi Kabi people, the landscape was not just a pantry but a network of places with spiritual meaning, Dreaming stories and responsibilities of care. The Glass House Mountains in particular hold a central place in their worldview, as we will see: they are not simply hills, but a family of ancestors turned to stone.
The Glass House Mountains, the volcanic peaks that dominate the hinterland, are sacred to the Kabi Kabi people. Their tradition tells that they are a family: the father Tibrogargan, the mother Beerwah (the tallest, and pregnant), and their children, among them Coonowrin (Crookneck), the one with the crooked neck. The story tells how Tibrogargan, seeing the waters rise, asked his son Coonowrin to help his mother, and how the father's anger at his son's response left Coonowrin with his neck bent forever. It is a Dreaming story that explains the landscape and passes on values. Captain James Cook, sailing past the coast in 1770, named them 'Glass House' because their outlines reminded him of the glass furnaces of his native Yorkshire.
The region was also the setting for one of the great events of Aboriginal Australia: the Bunya Gathering. The bunya tree (Araucaria bidwillii), plentiful in the inland mountains, produces an extraordinary crop of giant cones packed with edible nuts every few years. When that harvest came, the Kabi Kabi —one of the host peoples— invited nations from far-off regions to a great gathering that brought together hundreds and even thousands of people.
For weeks, around the bunya nuts, people held ceremonies, arranged marriages, settled disputes, traded goods and renewed alliances. The Bunya Gathering was at once a celebration of abundance and a political and social summit linking the peoples of south-east Queensland and beyond. It shows the complexity and richness of Aboriginal life on this land long before Europeans arrived.
Sustained European contact with the Sunshine Coast began in the mid-19th century. The first to arrive were the 'cedar getters' and 'timber getters', drawn by the highly prized Australian red cedar and other fine timbers of the subtropical rainforest. The explorer Andrew Petrie travelled along the coast in 1842, and over the following decades the timber getters pushed up the Maroochy, Mooloolah and Noosa rivers, using the water to float the logs out to sea. In 1856, William Pettigrew's sawmill set up a timber depot at Cotton Tree, at the mouth of the Mooloolah.
Settlers and farming followed the timber. Sugar cane became the region's big crop: towns such as Nambour grew up around the sugar mills, and later came fruit plantations (pineapple, banana) and cattle grazing in the hinterland. The Sunshine Coast of the 19th and early 20th centuries was a rural region of sawmills, cane fields and farms, very different from the beach destination we know today.
As across the whole Australian frontier, the taking of the land came at a devastating cost to the Kabi Kabi people. The clearing of the rainforest, the seizure of land and water sources, diseases brought from Europe and frontier violence decimated the Aboriginal population and broke their access to traditional places of food and ceremony. Many Kabi Kabi were displaced or confined to missions and reserves, though they never lost their connection to Country.
The 20th century turned the Sunshine Coast from a rural region into a holiday destination. As roads improved and cars became common, people from Brisbane began heading down to the coast for their summer holidays: holiday homes, campgrounds and seaside resorts sprang up in Caloundra, Mooloolaba, Maroochydore and Noosa. The name 'Sunshine Coast' caught on in the middle of the century as a tourism brand for the whole coastal strip north of Brisbane, a nod to the sunny climate that is its main draw.
The growth of tourism, the building of better roads (the Bruce Highway, the Sunshine Motorway) and, later, the regional airport established the Sunshine Coast as one of Australia's favourite destinations. Unlike the neighbouring Gold Coast, the region generally kept a lower-key, family-friendly profile, with building height limits in many areas and a strong focus on nature: the national parks of the coast and hinterland, the waterfalls, the Glass House Mountains and, in Noosa, one of the most visited national parks in the country.
A cultural milestone of the 20th and 21st centuries was Australia Zoo, in Beerwah. Founded by the Irwin family and made world-famous by Steve Irwin, 'the Crocodile Hunter', the zoo put the Sunshine Coast on the global map and made the conservation of Australian wildlife an emblem of the region. After Steve's tragic death in 2006, his family carried on his legacy, and the zoo remains one of the country's great attractions.
While the Sunshine Coast was growing into a holiday destination, its original people were travelling the long road towards legal recognition of their rights to the land. After the landmark 1992 'Mabo' decision of the High Court of Australia —which recognised native title for the first time and dismantled the legal fiction of 'terra nullius'—, the Kabi Kabi people pursued their claim over a large part of south-east Queensland.
That effort bore historic fruit in June 2024, when the Federal Court of Australia, under Justice Berna Collier, formally recognised Kabi Kabi native title over some 365,000 hectares of land and waters on the Sunshine Coast, including Caloundra, Maroochydore, Noosa, Gympie, Bribie Island and Mudjimba Island. It was the recognition of a long-denied truth: that the Kabi Kabi never stopped being the traditional owners of this coast and these mountains.
Today the Sunshine Coast lives with that dual identity. On one hand, it is one of Australia's best-loved beach and nature destinations: sun, sand, a green hinterland, the Glass House Mountains, Australia Zoo and a relaxed, family-friendly lifestyle. On the other, it is Kabi Kabi Country, increasingly visible through native title recognition, cultural tours led by descendants, the use of traditional place names and the shared care of the land. Exploring the Sunshine Coast means moving through those layers: the sacred Glass House Mountains and the ancient Bunya Gathering, the sawmills and cane fields of the colonial past, and today's coast of sunshine, all under the same bright sky that gave it its name.
