Best Things to Do in Canberra: Australia’s Capital Will Surprise You
Canberra gets a bad rap. Australians love to joke about it — a city “designed by committee”, full of public servants and roundabouts, with nothing to do after dark. Having spent a fair bit of time there over the years, I can tell you this reputation is spectacularly unfair. Canberra is one of the most interesting, surprising, and genuinely enjoyable cities in Australia — and it’s significantly underrated by travellers who pass it by on the way between Sydney and Melbourne.
The city was purpose-built to be Australia’s capital — a deliberate compromise between the rival claims of Sydney and Melbourne — and it shows. The urban planning is thoughtful, the public institutions are extraordinary (and mostly free), the food scene has flourished in recent years, and the natural setting — surrounded by rolling hills, a large artificial lake, and within easy reach of the Snowy Mountains — is genuinely beautiful. Come with an open mind and you’ll leave impressed.
📋 TL;DR – Best Things to Do in Canberra
- ✅ World-class museums are mostly free: The National Museum, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, and Australian War Memorial don’t charge for general admission.
- 🌸 Visit in spring for the Floriade festival: September and October transform Canberra’s Commonwealth Park into a breathtaking carpet of tulips and flowers.
- 🍷 The food and wine scene is excellent: Canberra District wines — particularly cool-climate Rieslings and Shiraz — are outstanding and underrated.
- 🚲 The city is very cycleable: Lake Burley Griffin has an excellent cycling path all the way around it — a great way to see the city’s major landmarks.
- 🏔️ Day trips to the Snowy Mountains are brilliant: Thredbo and Perisher are 2.5 hours away for skiing in winter, hiking in summer.
- 🌃 Canberra nights are better than you think: Braddon and New Acton precincts have excellent restaurants, bars, and a lively arts scene.
🏛️ The cultural institutions: world-class and mostly free
If there’s one thing Canberra does better than any other Australian city, it’s its public cultural institutions. Because Canberra is the national capital, it houses the collections, memorials, and galleries of the entire country — and most of them are free to enter. You could spend a week just visiting museums and galleries and still not see everything.
⚔️ Australian War Memorial
The Australian War Memorial is, without question, one of the finest war memorials in the world. It’s a museum, a memorial, and a work of architecture all at once — a Byzantine-domed building at the foot of Mount Ainslie, looking directly down Anzac Parade to Parliament House. Inside, the galleries cover Australia’s military history from the colonial era to Afghanistan, with enormous exhibits including original aircraft, tanks, submarines, and wartime artefacts. The Roll of Honour — the names of every Australian who has died in war, running along the memorial’s colonnades — is genuinely moving. The Last Post ceremony, held every evening at 5pm in the memorial’s courtyard, is something I’d urge every visitor to attend.
🎨 National Gallery of Australia
The National Gallery of Australia holds the country’s finest art collection, and the range is staggering: Australian Indigenous art, colonial landscapes, modernist works by Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, international masters including Monet, Picasso, and Warhol, and spectacular Asian and Pacific collections. The gallery also hosts world-class travelling exhibitions throughout the year — check what’s on before you visit, as the blockbuster shows can be genuinely unmissable. General admission is free; major exhibitions charge a separate fee.
🏺 National Museum of Australia
The National Museum tells the story of Australia as a nation — its people, its land, and its history from 50,000 years of Indigenous culture through to the present day. The building itself is remarkable: a deliberately provocative piece of architecture on a peninsula jutting into Lake Burley Griffin, full of angles, loops, and references to Australian history and landscape. The museum hosts excellent temporary exhibitions and has strong permanent galleries on Australian social history, Indigenous culture, and the environment. Free entry, and worth at least three hours of your time.
📚 National Portrait Gallery
Often overlooked, the National Portrait Gallery is one of Canberra’s hidden gems. It tells the story of Australia through the portraits of the people who shaped it — and the range is fascinating, from colonial governors to Indigenous elders, from sporting heroes to artists and politicians. The contemporary commissions — new portraits of living Australians commissioned each year — are often the most interesting. Free entry, and small enough to do justice to in an hour or two.
👉 Book Canberra City Tours & Experiences on GetYourGuide →
🏛️ Parliament House and the political heart of Australia
Parliament House is the centrepiece of Canberra’s carefully planned parliamentary triangle, and it’s both an extraordinary piece of architecture and a fully functioning legislature that you can walk into for free. The building, opened in 1988, is built into Capital Hill — the roof is a grassy lawn you can walk over — and its interiors blend stunning Australian materials (marble, granite, timber) with public art of real quality. When Parliament is sitting, you can watch Question Time from the public galleries (book ahead online — it’s popular and surprisingly entertaining). When Parliament is in recess, the building is open for self-guided exploration and the free guided tours are excellent.
Old Parliament House, on the lawn below the current building, now houses the Museum of Australian Democracy — an engaging exploration of how Australian democracy has developed, with the original senate and house chambers beautifully preserved. Exhibitions on the history of Australian politics, protest movements, and voting rights are thoughtfully curated and surprisingly gripping. Don’t dismiss it just because it sounds dry.
🚴 Lake Burley Griffin
Lake Burley Griffin sits at the geographic and symbolic heart of Canberra — an artificial lake created by damming the Molonglo River in the 1960s as part of architect Walter Burley Griffin’s original vision for the city. The 35km cycling and walking path around the lake is one of the best urban trails in Australia, passing virtually every major landmark: Parliament House, the National Gallery, the National Museum, the Captain Cook Memorial Water Jet (which shoots water 147 metres into the air), Regatta Point, and the Carillon on Aspen Island (a 55-bell instrument that gives regular concerts). Hire a bike from one of the city’s many hire stations and do the full loop — it takes about two hours at a leisurely pace.
🌸 Floriade: Canberra’s spring flower festival
Every September and October, Canberra hosts Floriade — Australia’s biggest celebration of spring, and one of the most visually spectacular events in the country. Commonwealth Park is transformed into an enormous garden of over a million flowering bulbs: tulips, daffodils, petunias, and pansies in every conceivable colour, arranged in elaborate designs that change each year. The festival runs for four weeks, includes free entertainment, food stalls, and a NightFest extension where the park is open after dark with lighting installations. If you’re visiting Canberra in spring and don’t coincide with Floriade, Woden’s Weston Park is also spectacular with cherry blossoms in August and September.
🍷 Canberra District wines
Canberra is surrounded by a wine region that’s been producing outstanding cool-climate wines since the 1970s, and which still doesn’t get nearly enough attention from Australian wine lovers. The Canberra District is particularly good for Riesling — crisp, mineral, and long-lived — and for Shiraz, which here tends toward the elegant, peppery style of the northern Rhône rather than the blockbuster fruit-bombs of warmer Australian regions. Clonakilla Wines is the flagship producer and its Shiraz-Viognier is one of Australia’s most celebrated wines; Lark Hill, Nick O’Leary, Ravensworth, and Eden Road are also well worth seeking out.
Most cellar doors are open on weekends and are within 30–45 minutes’ drive of the CBD. The Hall Village markets, held on the first Saturday of each month in the village of Hall just north of Canberra, are a brilliant place to buy local produce, meet the winemakers, and try a range of wines in an informal setting.
🏞️ Nature and outdoor adventures around Canberra
🦘 Namadgi National Park
More than half of the ACT is designated national park — an extraordinary statistic that most visitors don’t know. Namadgi National Park, which covers the mountainous south-west of the territory, offers excellent hiking, incredible Indigenous rock art sites, and some of the most beautiful alpine scenery in south-east Australia. The Yankee Hat walk to an Aboriginal rock art site is particularly rewarding; the Booroomba Rocks trail offers panoramic views that will leave you genuinely speechless. In winter, the higher elevations see snow — unusual so close to a capital city.
🌿 Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve
About 40 minutes from the CBD, Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve is one of the best places in Australia to see wildlife in a natural setting without a tour guide. The reserve is home to koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, echidnas, platypus, and a remarkable range of birdlife — including the endangered eastern bettong, which has been reintroduced here behind predator-proof fencing. The Birrigai rock shelter, near the reserve entrance, is an Aboriginal site of enormous significance, with evidence of human occupation extending back 21,000 years. Entry to the reserve is minimal (a few dollars per car) and the walking trails are excellent.
⛷️ The Snowy Mountains
Canberra’s location makes it the best base in Australia for winter skiing and snowboarding. Thredbo and Perisher — Australia’s two largest ski resorts — are just 2.5 hours away by car, making a day trip entirely feasible, though a mid-week night’s stay is infinitely better value than fighting the weekend crowds. In summer, the Snowy Mountains are superb for hiking — Kosciuszko National Park contains Australia’s highest peak (Mount Kosciuszko, 2,228m) and the alpine meadows are spectacular from November to March. The Charlotte Pass to Mount Kosciuszko walk is achievable by almost anyone who is reasonably fit and takes about 6 hours return.
👉 Book Canberra Day Tours & Activities on GetYourGuide →
🍽️ Where to eat and drink in Canberra
The food scene in Canberra has transformed in the past decade. The Braddon precinct — previously a light industrial strip north of the city — is now packed with excellent restaurants, bars, specialty coffee shops, and artisan food producers. Lonsdale Street in Braddon is the epicentre: grab breakfast at one of the specialty coffee roasters, lunch at a casual dumpling or noodle shop, and return for dinner at one of the serious restaurants that have opened here in recent years. Barrio, Pilot, and Italian and Sons are consistently praised; the Passing Clouds nightclub and its associated bar scene has given Canberra an after-dark culture it previously lacked.
The New Acton precinct, around the award-winning Nishi development, has a slightly more curated feel: excellent small bars, the Monster Kitchen and Bar, and a cluster of galleries and design shops. Kingston Foreshore, on the south shore of Lake Burley Griffin, is the place for Sunday brunch — relaxed outdoor dining with lake views and a good farmers’ market on Sunday mornings. Don’t overlook the Belconnen Fresh Food Markets for extraordinary local produce at wholesale prices.
💡 Practical tips for visiting Canberra
- 🚗 A car is useful: Canberra is spread out, and while a free bus service covers many tourist areas, having your own transport makes life much easier, especially for wine region visits and day trips.
- 🌡️ Dress for temperature swings: Canberra has a continental climate — hot summers, cold winters, and rapid temperature changes at any time of year. Pack layers.
- 📅 Check what’s on: Canberra’s cultural calendar is packed — major exhibitions, festivals, and events run throughout the year. The Canberra tourism website is a good starting point.
- 🏨 Accommodation is better value than Sydney: Hotels and apartments in Canberra are generally significantly cheaper than equivalent Sydney options, which makes it an attractive base for an extended stay.
- 🎓 The ANU campus is worth exploring: The Australian National University campus has excellent cafés, art galleries, and a laid-back student atmosphere that gives the city a youthful energy in term time.
Canberra deserves more than a stopover. Give it two or three days — more if you want to explore the wine region and the Snowy Mountains — and come with your preconceptions firmly set aside. The city that Australians love to dismiss as boring is quietly, confidently building a case to be considered one of the country’s best.
Exploring more of Canberra and the ACT, read our guides to best adventure activities Australia, the best places in Canberra ACT, aboriginal museums Canberra, National gallery Australia Canberra, the best places in Tasmania, and the best places in western Australia.
