Australia's most liveable city and the wine capital of the Southern Hemisphere — where the Adelaide Central Market has operated since 1869 under the same iron and glass roof, the Barossa Valley's German Lutheran settlers planted shiraz vines in 1847 that are now among the oldest producing wine vines in the world, the Adelaide Fringe Festival is the world's second-largest arts festival after Edinburgh, and Kangaroo Island (1 hour by ferry) contains one of the last pristine Australian wildlife ecosystems
Adelaide (1.4 million; metro 1.5 million) is the capital of South Australia and the city most often cited in international liveability surveys as Australia's most pleasant to live in — planned in 1836 by Colonel William Light on a grid surrounded by a continuous ring of parkland (the Adelaide Park Lands, 760 hectares of unbuilt public green space encircling the entire CBD, the most intact planned 19th-century city in the world). The city sits at the foot of the Mount Lofty Ranges and at the top of the St. Vincent Gulf, with 300+ days of sunshine a year (a Mediterranean climate matching southe…
The Kaurna people occupied the Adelaide Plains for at least 40,000 years before European contact — the city is built on Kaurna land, the people called the area Tandanya ('red kangaroo place'), and their language (revived since the 1990s) is now used in official city signage and welcomes to country. South Australia was established in 1836 as the world's first planned democracy: unlike the other Australian colonies (established as penal colonies), South Australia admitted no convicts, was intended from the outset to be governed by elected representatives, and became the first place in the Briti…