Paronella Park

Paronella Park is the strangest tourist attraction in Far North Queensland and one of the most atmospheric in the country. A Spanish immigrant with no architectural training spent the 1930s pouring his own concrete to build a fairy-tale complex of castle, ballroom, grand staircase and avenue of kauri pines on the banks of Mena Creek, alongside the falls. Bushfire, cyclones and decades of jungle have done their work; what remains is half ruin, half garden, with strangler figs growing through the masonry and roots prising apart staircases.

The ticket includes a guided day tour, a self-guided walk, and after-dark a "Dragonfly" night tour with the buildings lit by floodlights and Paronella's original hydro-electric plant — restored and once again powering the property — humming away. Tickets are valid for two years, so you can come back in the daylight or revisit the night tour. The on-site café serves passable lunch and there is a tiny campground next door for caravans and tents.

Allow at least three hours, longer if you stay for the night tour. The site sits 90 km south of Cairns on the Old Bruce Highway; coastal travellers usually combine it with Mission Beach or Innisfail.

things to do sight
A story
José Paronella arrived in North Queensland from Catalonia in 1913 and made his money cutting and reselling cane farms. In 1929 he bought five hectares of riverbank at Mena Creek and spent the next eleven years building a Spanish castle, a tea garden, a ballroom, and a hydro-electric station — by hand, mostly using sand and a railway line for reinforcement. He died in 1948; the family ran it as a pleasure ground until a 1979 fire and a 1986 cyclone gutted the structures. The current owners bought the wreck in 1993 and have run it as a controlled ruin ever since.