Adelaide has a reputation problem, and a fair bit of it comes from other Australians. It is the state capital that many people skip on the way between Melbourne and Perth, and if you ask around you will hear the word “quiet” used in a way that is not entirely complimentary.
I spent a week in Adelaide travelling solo, and while the city is quieter than others, I don’t think its reputation adds up.
Yes, Adelaide is worth visiting, especially if you want a walkable, low-stress city with two of the best day trips in Australia on its doorstep. It is not the city to pick if you want a wild night out, but it is the one to pick if you want free museums, good food and a compact centre wrapped in parkland.
Adelaide was not a convict colony, and from the city layout, you can really tell. Unlike Sydney, Hobart, and Brisbane, Adelaide was never a penal settlement. It was established as a free colony and laid out from the start as a planned city for paying British settlers, with a surveyed grid, wide streets and a deliberate ring of parkland around it.
You can feel that in the way Adelaide is put together. The centre is orderly, which most Australian cities are not, the streets are very wide, and the entire city has a slightly formal quality of somewhere built with civic pride.
That civic ambition did not stop in the 1830’s. The city’s main hospital, the Royal Adelaide Hospital, is one of the most expensive hospital buildings ever constructed anywhere in the world, and every bed in it sits in a single room. Adelaide also carries real weight in medical research for a city of its size. None of which is a tourist attraction, but it does tell you something about Adelaide – it is not as sleepy as other cities would have you believe.
No, and I say that as somebody braced for the boring. What Adelaide gave me was room to breathe. This was the start of a long solo trip, and had I begun somewhere like Melbourne I do not think I would have had the quieter, more reflective days I got here. There is a rhythm to travelling along that takes a few days to find, and Adelaide is a surprisingly good place to find it. Quiet is only a fault if you were counting on noise.
The “Boring” label is largely an interstate joke, kept alive for decades by people in Sydney and Melbourne, and often by people who have not spent much time in Adelaide.
There is a grain of truth in it; the centre is subdued on a weeknight outside of festival season, and there is no Opera House or Harbour Bridge to point a camera at, and if you have come from a denser city, calm can read as empty. What locals experience as easy, a first-time visitor chasing postcard sights can experience as underwhelming.
What the label misses is that the city obviously has some pulls, as it wouldn’t be a city otherwise! Adelaide is Australia’s first and only UNESCO City of Music. It is one of a small group of Great Wine Capitals worldwide, sitting alongside Bordeaux and Porto. It appears near the top of global liveability rankings with some regularity.
Even the Wall Street Journal ran a piece calling it the coolest city in Australia, which caused predictable outrage in Tasmania. That article recommended, among other places, Osteria Oggi, the restaurant I had already booked without even reading it, which tells you something about how easy the good stuff is to stumble into here.
I had a week in Adelaide and still came home with things unticked. Follow the links if you want the full list of Things To Do In Adelaide, or How To Spend $0 In Adelaide.
Adelaide is known as the city of churches, and reason is a great deal more than just having a few churches. It is not really about the number of buildings, it is more about what the colony was set up to be.
Most of the Australian colonies began as convict settlements with strong ties to the Church of England. South Australia was designed from the outset as something different – a free province with no convicts, no state church, and no denomination receiving public money or official favour. For the British Empire in the 1830’s, that was a radical proposition.
The colony drew heavily on British Nonconformists, the Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists and Quakers who had spent generations at a legal and social disadvantage in Britain because of the privileged position of the established church. South Australia was their chance to build somewhere that did not work that way.
A wealthy Baptist businessman, and most associated with the colony’s religious liberties. He wanted South Australia to be a refuge where dissenting believers could practise without penalty, and he actively helped German Lutherans fleeing persecution in Prussia to settle here.
The promoter and the theorist behind the colonisation scheme that made the entire endeavour possible.
The founding legislation of 1834 carried a late parliamentary compromise allowing for chaplains from the established church, but the governing principle held; every denomination would rely on the voluntary support of its own members rather than on the state. When a governor tried to introduce limited state aid to religion in the 1840s, colonists organised against and won. South Australia went on to abolish state aid entirely, and is generally credited as the first part of the British Empire to do so.
What that produced on the ground, is a city where Anglicans, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Quakers and a Jewish community all arrived early and all built for themselves, with no one tradition subsidised above another. Hence, the churches, and hence the variety of them.
The same instinct for reform ran on into other things as well. This was the colony that gave the woman the vote before anywhere else in Australia, and the connection is not a coincidence.
You do not need to be religious to enjoy the result of Australia’s City of Churches. It is an unusual architectural city for a city of this size, and if you like photographing buildings, as I do, the centre and North Adelaide give you a great deal to work with.
March is the best month to visit Adelaide, because the entire city bursts into activity – the locals even call it Mad March. This is when the Adelaide Fringe, the Adelaide Festival, and a large world music festival in Botanic Park all land in roughly the same window. The Fringe alone is the biggest arts festival in the southern hemisphere and, by most measures, second in the world only to Edinburgh.
I went in January, and the city was already visibly getting ready for it. I did not see it in full swing, so I cannot tell you what Adelaide feels like when it is full. What I can tell you is that the “Adelaide Is Boring” question gets a very different answer depending on which month you ask it in. If the quiet is what puts you off, go in March. If the quiet is the appeal, do not.
I travelled solo, walked the centre at various different times of the day, and had no problems at all. I do admit, I am a bloke in my late-20’s, so a female perspective may be different, but most of the people I encountered were friendly.
On a whole, Adelaide is generally considered one of the safer Australian capitals, and my experience matched that. The centre is well lit, compact and busy enough in the evening on the main strips without feeling chaotic. Eating alone at a restaurant, booking single places on tours and waking back to accommodation after dinner all felt entirely normal.
The usual sensible practice applies and is not specific to Adelaide – stick to lit and populated streets late at night, keep an eye on your belongings in busy shopping areas, and use a Uber if you are unsure. Quieter parts of the parklands after dark are not where you want to be walking on your own, for the same reason, you would not do that in any city park anywhere.
On solo travel more broadly, Adelaide is an easy place to do it. The day tours to the Barossa and Kangaroo Island are sociable enough that you will end up talking to people, restaurants take single bookings without a fuss, and the compactness of the centre means you are rarely far from somewhere with people in it.
Join thousands of travelers looking for inspiration from our FREE Planet Travel newsletter!
Your step-by-step framework for stress-free, unforgettable trips — from first idea to final itinerary.
Your step-by-step framework for stress-free, unforgettable trips — from first idea to final itinerary.
Join thousands of travelers looking for inspiration from our FREE Planet Travel newsletter!
