Four days in Adelaide: a city that put a park all the way round itself

Three nights inside the grid: the best Aboriginal collection in the world, a market under a Victorian roof, giant pandas, and a day in the hills with koalas and a German village.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Adelaide
Places
10 across 4 days
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Adelaide was drawn before it was built. Colonel William Light picked the site in 1836 and set out a grid of wide streets and five public squares, then ringed the entire thing in a continuous belt of parkland so the city could never grow into its own suburbs. He was hounded for the choice, resigned, and died of tuberculosis three years later. Nearly two centuries on, his plan is still the reason walking here is so pleasant: you cannot leave the centre in any direction without crossing a park.

It was also a free colony. No convicts were transported here, which sounds like a footnote and is not: the settlement was sold to free migrants and religious dissenters, and the result was a city of churches, a strong German farming presence in the hills, and a self-image built on being respectable rather than rowdy. Adelaide has spent a hundred and fifty years being called quiet and about thirty of them being quietly good at food, wine and festivals.

Four days works because everything is close. Two are spent inside the grid, one crosses into the hills where the koalas and the German village are, and the last one takes the tram to the beach on the way to the airport.

Highlights

  • The largest collection of Aboriginal material anywhere, and it costs nothing to see
  • Central Market on a Saturday morning, when the whole city seems to be in it
  • Giant pandas, on loan from China, in a zoo you can cross in an hour
  • A koala in a gum tree twenty minutes from the city, not in an enclosure
  • The last hour of daylight on Glenelg jetty, reached by tram for the price of a bus fare

Where to stay

Adelaide, three nights inside the grid

Stay inside the square mile. The grid is a kilometre and a half across, the free tram runs through the middle of it, and everything on the first two days is within twenty minutes on foot.

The east end around Rundle Street and the parklands is the pleasant side, with the botanic gardens and the zoo at the end of the road. The west end near the market is cheaper and closer to the airport bus. North Adelaide, over the river and up the hill, is quiet, Georgian and ten minutes' walk from the oval.

Day by day

Day 1 in Adelaide

The botanic garden, a rainforest under glass, and the pandas

Start on the eastern parklands, which is where the city keeps the things worth doing on a first afternoon. The botanic garden dates from 1857 and is free, quiet and unfussy: lawns, a lily pond big enough for the giant Amazon waterlilies, and a palm house shipped out from Bremen in 1875.

The strange one is at the far end. The Bicentennial Conservatory is a single arched glasshouse holding a lowland rainforest from northern Australia and New Guinea, with real mist blown down from the roof and full sized trees inside it. It is hot, humid and completely unlike the dry city outside, which is the point.

Then walk through the gate into the zoo next door. Adelaide has the only giant pandas in the southern hemisphere, on a long term arrangement with China, and the rest of the collection is the usual, done well. It is a small zoo and two hours covers it.

Eat on Rundle Street on the way back.

  1. 14:30

    The Adelaide Botanic Garden

    Nature

    Free, open from dawn, and five minutes from the east end of the grid. There is a cafe in the middle and a conservatory at the far end. Come in from the gates at the top, by the museums.

  2. 15:45

    Bicentennial Conservatory

    Visit

    A single glass arch holding a lowland rainforest, hung with endangered trees from Queensland, New Guinea and the Pacific. Warm and humid, which is a relief in July and a shock in January.

  3. 16:40

    Adelaide Zoo

    Leisure

    Small, walkable in two hours, and the only zoo south of the equator with giant pandas. Also quokkas, capybaras and a good nocturnal house. The panda enclosure has timed viewing when it is busy.

  4. 19:00

    Dinner on Rundle Street

    Eat

    The east end strip, five minutes back towards the grid, with tables on the footpath and a good spread of Italian, Greek and Vietnamese. Book on a Friday.

With more time: If you arrive early enough, walk north across the river to the oval instead. The roof climb over the grandstand runs day and night and takes in the whole plan of the city from above, which is the clearest way to see what Light actually drew.

Day 2 in Adelaide

The market, then the best Aboriginal collection in the world

Go to the Central Market first and go hungry. It has been trading on the same site since 1869, it sits under a Victorian roof at the bottom of the grid, and it is not a tourist market: this is where Adelaide buys its food. Around eighty stalls, a lot of them run by the same families for three generations, and a lane of Malaysian and Vietnamese kitchens attached to one side. Tuesday to Saturday only, and Saturday morning is the one to aim for.

Then walk north to the boulevard along the top of the grid, where the state lined up all of its institutions in a row. The South Australian Museum holds the largest collection of Australian Aboriginal cultural material in existence, more than thirty thousand objects, and the two floors given to it are the single best reason to come to Adelaide. It is free, and it deserves more time than you will plan for.

The art gallery is next door and also free, with a very good colonial and contemporary Australian collection and a room of Indigenous work that reads as a continuation of the museum rather than a separate subject.

  1. 08:30

    The Central Market

    Other

    Trading since 1869 under a single Victorian roof, with about eighty stalls and a row of Asian food counters running off the Moonta Street side. Closed Sunday and Monday. Eat breakfast here rather than at the hotel.

  2. 11:00

    South Australian Museum

    Culture

    Free, on the museum boulevard, and holding the largest collection of Aboriginal cultural material anywhere in the world. The Pacific cultures gallery upstairs has been left in its Victorian cases on purpose and is worth seeing for that alone.

  3. 13:30

    Lunch in the museum courtyard

    Eat

    There is a cafe between the museum and the library, outside under the plane trees, and the whole boulevard is a two minute walk in either direction if it is full.

  4. 14:30

    Art Gallery of South Australia

    Culture

    Free as well, next door along the same row, and strong on colonial Australian painting and contemporary Indigenous work. Bags go in the free cloakroom. Ninety minutes is enough unless a touring show is on.

With more time: The migration museum is behind the library, in the old destitute asylum, and tells the story of who came to South Australia and why. It is small and free and takes an hour, and it makes better sense of the German villages you will see tomorrow than any of the villages will.

Day 3 in Adelaide

Into the hills: koalas, the summit and a German main street

The Adelaide Hills begin where the parklands end, and the road climbs from sea level to seven hundred metres in twenty minutes. That is the whole appeal: a genuinely different landscape, cooler and wetter and full of stringybark forest, within half an hour of the market you were in yesterday.

Go to Cleland first. It is a conservation park under the peak, and its wildlife section lets kangaroos and emus wander freely among the visitors while the koalas sit in real gum trees rather than pens. If you want the walk instead, the track up from Waterfall Gully to the summit climbs beside a chain of waterfalls and takes about ninety minutes.

The lookout at the top of Mount Lofty gives you the entire plain: the grid, the parklands, the suburbs running west, and the Gulf St Vincent behind them. On a clear day you can see Kangaroo Island.

Then drop over the far side to Hahndorf, founded in 1839 by Lutheran families fleeing Prussia and the oldest surviving German settlement in Australia. It is unashamedly touristed now, with smallgoods shops and bakeries and a great deal of strudel, but the main street of half timbered cottages under plane trees is genuinely a hundred and eighty years old.

  1. 09:30

    Cleland Conservation Park

    Leisure

    On the slope below the summit, with a wildlife park where the kangaroos are loose on the paths and the koalas are in trees. The walking trails from Waterfall Gully start at the bottom of the same park.

  2. 12:30

    Mount Lofty Lookout

    Visit

    Over seven hundred metres up, with the whole plain, the coast and the gulf laid out below. There is a cafe and a visitor centre at the top. A couple of buses a day come up here, so check the timetable carefully if you are not driving.

  3. 14:00

    Hahndorf

    Other

    Australia's oldest surviving German settlement, founded 1839, and a single main street of cottages, bakeries and smallgoods shops under plane trees. Twenty minutes on from the summit. Busy at weekends.

With more time: This is also the day to add a cellar door or two, because you are already in the Adelaide Hills and the cool climate whites are the region's best work. The Hans Heysen studio outside Hahndorf is the other option: the house and painting room of the artist who defined how Australians picture a gum tree.

Day 4 in Adelaide

The tram to the beach, then out

Adelaide's one tram line runs from the middle of the grid to the sea, and it takes half an hour. Glenelg is where the colony actually landed in 1836, under a gum tree that is still standing, and it has been the city's beach ever since.

There is a long jetty, a wide flat beach, a square with a pub on it and a row of cafes facing the water. It is not dramatic, and it is not trying to be. The reason to spend a last morning here is that the airport sits between Glenelg and the city, which makes it the most efficient possible way to end a trip: swim, eat, then twenty minutes to the terminal.

Go early if it is summer. By eleven the beach is full and the tram back is standing room only.

  1. 09:00

    Glenelg Beach

    Visit

    Half an hour from the grid on the one tram line, with a jetty, a broad flat beach and a square of cafes behind it. Patrolled in summer. The old pub on the square does the best sit-down breakfast on the coast.

  2. 12:00

    Lunch on the esplanade

    Eat

    Fish, or the pub. Sit facing the water and give yourself an hour before the bus or taxi, because the airport is only fifteen minutes away from here.

With more time: The small museum in the old town hall on the square covers the landing and the town that grew from it, and takes forty minutes. If the weather has turned, it is a better use of the morning than a windy jetty.

Before you go

Getting in and getting around

Adelaide Airport is seven kilometres west of the centre, which is closer than any other Australian capital's, and a bus runs into town in about twenty minutes. Taxis and rideshares take fifteen.

In the city, tap a contactless card. Adelaide Metro runs trains, buses and one tram line, and unlike everywhere else in Australia you only tap on, never off. The tram runs free through the centre from the Entertainment Centre to South Terrace, which covers most of the walking you would otherwise do, and then keeps going out to the beach at Glenelg for an ordinary fare.

One thing catches everybody out. South Australia keeps its own time zone, half an hour behind Sydney and Melbourne. It is not a rounding error, it is the actual rule, and it applies to your connecting flight.

Wine, and how close it is

Adelaide has more good wine within an hour of it than any other city in the world has, which is a large claim and stands up. The Barossa is an hour north east and does shiraz and old German family names. McLaren Vale is forty minutes south, warmer and by the sea. The Adelaide Hills, twenty minutes from the centre, does cool climate chardonnay and sauvignon blanc.

None of these needs a tour, but all of them need a driver. Buses reach the edges of the regions and not the cellar doors. If you are only doing one and cannot drive, make it the hills, since the third day already climbs into them.

When to go

February and March are when Adelaide stops being quiet. The Fringe runs for a month and is the second largest arts festival in the world after Edinburgh, the Adelaide Festival overlaps it, and a supercar race closes streets in the parklands. The city is transformed and accommodation triples in price.

Otherwise come in autumn or spring. Adelaide is the driest capital in the country and summer regularly clears forty degrees, which is genuinely unpleasant for walking and turns the hills into a fire risk. Winter is mild, wet and very cheap.

Adelaide is the Australian capital that visitors leave off the list, usually to spend another day somewhere louder. What they miss is a city small enough to cross on foot, with a world class museum that costs nothing, a market that still feeds the place it stands in, and hills full of vineyards twenty minutes from the tram stop.

Four days is enough to stop measuring it against Sydney and start noticing that nothing here is a queue.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Adelaide worth four days?
Yes, if one of them leaves the city. The grid takes two days at a comfortable pace, the hills take one, and the beach fills a last morning. If you only have two days, do the market, the museum and the hills, and skip the rest.
Do I need a car?
Only for the third day, and even that has a bus to the summit if you plan around the timetable. The rest of this plan runs on a free city tram, one paid tram to the beach, and your feet.
Barossa or Adelaide Hills?
The Barossa if you care about shiraz and old vines, and it needs a full day and a driver. The hills if you want cool climate whites, a shorter drive and koalas on the same trip. The hills are the one this plan takes because they combine with everything else.
What is the time zone thing?
South Australia runs half an hour behind New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, and an hour and a half ahead of Western Australia. It is a real offset, not a quirk of local practice, and it catches out flight bookings more than anything else.
Should I come during the Fringe?
If you want the city at full volume, yes: it runs through February and March and is the second biggest arts festival on earth. If you want to walk into a museum without queueing and pay a normal price for a bed, come at literally any other time.