Paronella Park Day Trip | Northern Queensland

Paronella Park is one of Queensland’s most popular attractions and makes a great day trip from Cairns. This 5 hectare magical wonderland is filled with over 7000 tropical trees and palms, has a Spanish castle, and it’s own waterfall. You will fall in love as soon as you enter.

Paronella Park

What’s not to love about Paronella Park. Since opening it’s doors in 1935 it has become one of the most popular day trips from Cairns and must see places to visit in north Queensland.

The 13 acer piece of land along Mena Creek was originally owned by José Paronella, a Spanish native, who moved to Australia in 1929 and started to build his dream.

Inspired from his travels around the world, he built a house, and then started on the castle and worked on the gardens planting more than 7,000 trees, creating a magical garden, and eventually opening it up to the public in 1935.

When you visit Paronella Park, there is the option to walk freely through the park, or take a free tour. The tours are about half an hour and well worth it.

They give you information about the park, the history and all that José Paronella achieved. It is truly amazing how his legacy has lived on through the park after all of these years.

You will need around 2hours to walk around the beautiful grounds seeing the waterfalls and the ruins.

There is fish food available and you can feed the fish, turtles and eels. If you are visiting Paronella park with kids, they will love this!

Paronella Park Night Tour

The Paronella Park night tour is a must, and if you can stay until the evening it is a definite highlight.

Everyone gets a torch and you walk around to see all of the old stone buildings lit up. It’s just magical.

Day Trip From Cairns

You need around 2-3 hours or so in Paronella Park. If you get there too early you probably won’t stay around for the night tour so we suggest making a stop along the way and making a full day out of it.

For a day trip from Cairns, we suggest leaving early and stopping to see the Babinda Boulders on the way. The Babinda Boulders are the large granite boulders set on the cascading stream of water, another fantastic Cairns attraction and the perfect spot for a stopover to stretch your legs.

If you leave by 9, you can stop at the Boulders, take a walk around, have an early lunch and have a dip in the swimming holes if you like. They are gorgeous, but quite fresh.

Arriving early afternoon at Paronella Park is perfect timing.

You can then take a day tour of the park, walk around, have dinner and wait for the night tour to see the lights.

The last tour finishes at 7.30pm so although a big day, you can still make it back to Cairns.