Landmarks in Australian Capital Territory

The Australian Capital Territory is a city built as a landmark. Canberra was designed from 1913 to embody the nation, and our ACT catalogue reads like a tour of Australia's identity: Parliament House on Capital Hill, the Australian War Memorial at the head of Anzac Parade, the National Gallery, the National Library, the High Court and the National Carillon on Lake Burley Griffin — nearly all free to enter and nearly all highly rated by visitors.

The city's landmark axis is deliberate. Walter Burley Griffin's plan runs a parliamentary triangle between Capital Hill, City Hill and Russell, with Anzac Parade's memorials lining the approach to the War Memorial — which, with its tens of thousands of reviews, ranks as one of Australia's most loved landmarks of any kind. The lake's basin adds the Captain Cook Memorial Jet and globe, the National Museum and Commonwealth Park, while Mount Ainslie and the Arboretum provide the lookouts that reveal the city's geometry.

Beyond the monuments, Canberra's catalogue includes surprises: Cockington Green's miniature world, the National Zoo and Aquarium, Telstra Tower's panorama and the Tidbinbilla nature reserve on the city's edge. Parkes, Acton and the inner suburbs hold the greatest concentration, with the national institutions clustered around the lake.

Because everything sits within a twenty-minute drive, the ACT is Australia's easiest landmark city to cover — a weekend genuinely suffices for the icons, and our Canberra pages rank them all by visitor data. Start with the ranked ACT list, browse the suburbs below, or filter by museums and monuments-and-memorials, the categories where the national capital is unmatched.