About the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia

The Gold Coast is unique in Australia as both the premier tourist destination plus the sixth largest city in the nation – making it the biggest non-capital city.

In the late 1940s, Brisbane journalists began calling the coastal strip that lay south of Brisbane the ‘Gold Coast’.

Land sales were buoyant during this post-war real estate boom era and our coastal area was in demand with both buyers and sellers. The local civic leaders thought the name Gold Coast was an ideal one for the area so on October 23, 1958 the South Coast Town Council adopted the name Gold Coast Town Council.

Today the Gold Coast spans across 1402 square kilometres from the NSW border in the south, the Albert River in the north, the sea to the east and the mountains to the west. It features 70 kilometres of magnificent beach and coastline from South Stradbroke Island to Rainbow Bay.

In the 1950s and 60s, development on the Gold Coast became hectic and it has never really ceased since then. Guesthouses, holiday homes and motels sprung up from Southport to Coolangatta, together with holiday apartments and shopping arcades. The first canal estates of Chevron and Paradise Islands along with the Isle of Capri were built in late 1950s and Kinkabool became the first Gold Coast high rise when its 10-storeys were completed in Surfers Paradise in 1960.

The Gold Coast boasts a permanent population in excess of 500,000 people and this figure is steadily climbing.

Climate

Research in the late 1990s highlighted the Gold Coast at the most biologically diverse city in Australia with its mountain rainforests and coastal wetlands home to more than 300 species of birds, 72 mammals, 34 species of amphibians and 71 types of reptiles.

It has an amazing sub-tropical climate with 287 days of sunshine each year and an average water temperature of 22 degrees. There is a large broadwater, five major river systems and more than 270 kilometres of navigable waterways.