Australia's surf and sun capital — where 57 kilometres of unbroken Pacific coastline running from South Stradbroke Island to Coolangatta, the world's best theme park precinct (Dreamworld, Warner Bros. Movie World, Sea World, Wet'n'Wild in a single corridor), Surfers Paradise's high-rise skyline meets the beach in one of the most visually improbable urban landscapes in Australia, and the Hinterland's McPherson Range rainforest is 30 minutes from the broadband
Gold Coast (700,000; metro 750,000) is Queensland's second city and Australia's sixth-largest urban area — a 57-kilometre coastal city defined entirely by its beaches (Surfers Paradise, Broadbeach, Burleigh Heads, Coolangatta) that was barely a village in 1940 and grew into Australia's fastest-growing city through the 1950s–1980s as domestic air travel made Queensland's perfect blue-sky climate accessible to the entire country. The city's iconic high-rise skyline (over 500 high-rise buildings, more than Sydney's CBD) backing directly onto Pacific beach — a visual compression of beach life and…
The Yugambeh peoples occupied the Gold Coast hinterland and coastal areas for at least 20,000 years before European contact — 'Yugambeh' encompasses about a dozen language groups (Kombumerri, Minjungbal, Mununjali, among others) sharing common language roots across the coastal strip and hinterland. The area was first called 'The Gold Coast' by Brisbane newspaper journalists in the 1950s as a marketing name for what was then called 'The South Coast' — the name stuck and was formally adopted by the municipality in 1959. The 1967 declaration of Surfers Paradise as a tourism special purpose zone…