One of Australia’s most remarkable natural gifts, the Great Barrier Reef is blessed with the breathtaking beauty of the world’s largest coral reef. The reef contains an abundance of marine life and comprises of over 3000 individual reef systems, coral cays and literally hundreds of picturesque tropical islands with some of the worlds most beautiful sun-soaked, golden beaches.
The Great Barrier Reef is one of the seven wonders of the natural world, viewing it from a greater distance, you can understand why. It is larger than the Great Wall of China and the only living thing on earth visible from space.
The Great Barrier Reef includes over 3000 reefs, around 940 islands and cays, and stretches 2,300 kms along the Queensland coastline. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is 345,000 km2, that’s larger than the entire area of the UK and Ireland combined!
The reef is immensely diverse with 1,500 species of fish, 359 types of hard coral, one third of the world’s soft corals, six of the world’s seven species of threatened marine turtle and more than 30 species of marine mammals including vulnerable dugongs.
Adding to that stunning marine life are 5,000 to 8,000 molluscs and thousands of different sponges, worms, crustaceans, 800 species of echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins) and 215 bird species, 29 are seabirds.
