Springbrook

Summary

If the Gold Coast hinterland was home to a supermodel it would most certainly be Springbrook with its Antarctic beech trees, native wildlife and luscious lookouts. After all, where else can you find a place named The Best of All Lookouts? Your biggest issue here will be where to start.

Visitors are spoiled for choice with four sections to Springbrook National Park which sits 36 kilometres from Nerang. Springbrook plateau offers loads of lookouts and the fabulous views you can expect from this World Heritage-listed Gondwana Rainforest. Mount Cougal, which sits to the east, offers an insight into the area's logging history while Natural Bridge to the west is home to a beautiful waterfall by day and glowworms at night. Numinbah also sits to the west.

Pack a picnic and enjoy lunch along the shaded banks of the Nerang River at Forest Park. There's also camping in the Settlement Area and wildlife galore including lace monitors, black skinks and carpet pythons. More than 100 bird species live in this park and visitors are most likely to hear, rather than see, the elusive and unique Albert's lyrebird who lives here. Among the creeks and waterways you'll find frogs, crayfish and eels.

Boasting nine walking tracks, and a guided walking program, it's your boots you'll need most of all here. Take your time and wander through cool forests and paddle among mountain streams. Enjoy the subtropical and temperate rainforest, open eucalypt forest and montane heath. Talk to the animals. Go on, take a hike, in the nicest possible sense, along nature's colourful catwalk.