Litchfield National Park: Darwin's Weekend Waterfall Destination

Litchfield National Park, 100 kilometres south of Darwin and accessible on sealed road, provides Darwin residents with a weekend destination of extraordinary natural quality, combining the termite mound landscapes of the plateau, the waterfalls and swimming holes of the escarpment edge, and the monsoon rainforest gullies that provide habitat for the park's diverse wildlife. The park's swimming holes, including Wangi Falls, Florence Falls, and Buley Rockhole, provide the best inland swimming in the Northern Territory and the experience that most Darwin residents regard as the definitive Dry season leisure activity.

Wangi Falls' twin cascade into a large plunge pool surrounded by monsoon rainforest is the park's most visited and most photographed location, providing the tropical waterfall swimming experience that postcards of the Territory most commonly feature. The falls' plunge pool allows swimming within metres of the cascade, creating the shower experience that the surrounding heat makes intensely pleasurable and that visitors from the southern states find as exhilarating as any natural water experience they have had.

The magnetic termite mounds that line the entrance road to Litchfield provide one of Australia's most distinctive natural phenomena, the flattened wedge-shaped mounds oriented north-south to minimise solar heat gain in the morning and afternoon while maximising the warming flat surface to the rising and setting sun. The mounds' orientation is so precise that they have been used as navigation aids, and the scientific explanation of their construction remains a subject of research interest despite decades of study.

The park's wildlife, including the flying foxes that roost in colonies visible in the monsoon rainforest, the freshwater crocodiles that inhabit the creek systems, and the bird diversity that the combination of woodland, rainforest, and wetland habitat types supports, provides the nature encounter that complements the waterfall swimming for visitors whose interest extends beyond the recreational to the ecological.

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