Adelaide is a city that pleasantly surprised me, and I wish I had planned to spend slightly longer here during my road trip across Australia. If you are coming to Adelaide, I would definitely recommend coming for a week rather than a weekend, because the best of South Australia is within a day’s reach of it.
I spent a week there travelling solo in January, and spent a few days in the city, and a couple days on excursions out of the city. This city is a lot slower pace than that of Melbourne, but felt like a great way to start the road trip.
A good week in Adelaide means two days in the city for the free North Terrace museums, the zoo and the Adelaide Oval tour, one day in the Barossa Valley, one long day on Kangaroo Island, and two or three days of slower time, beaches or the drive out east. Four days is the realistic minimum if you want both major day trips.
I went in January, which is high summer, and the heat did end up shaping what I did each day.
Adelaide is hot and dry, with heat on some days making midday sightseeing hard work. It is good for the beaches and for long light in the evenings, and it is when the city feels busiest. If you go then, plan indoor things for the middle of the day and try not to schedule anything demanding after lunch.
My Airbnb host recommended coming back in Autumn. They said that I should definitely come back for the browning leaves, and having seen how much of the city and Adelaide Hills is planted with deciduous trees, I can see the potential. Milder temperatures and autumn colour sounds like the better trip, and it is what I would try next time.
Also, in March, the entirety of Adelaide comes alive for Adelaide Fringe, the Adelaide Festival and a large world music festival in Botanic Park, which you can read more on in our Is Adelaide Worth Visiting? blog.
Adelaide is cool and wetter, but rarely cold by British standards. The wine regions are quiet and the light is good.
Brings wildflowers and comfortable walking weather before the heat arrives.
If you have a choice, aim for Spring or Autumn, and avoid the peak of summer. If you cannot, plan around the middle of the day rather than through it.
When I visited Adelaide, I spent quite a lot of time planning the trip, and this was the most optimised itinerary I could come up with for such a short amount of time in the city:
Free museums, gallery, orientation, easy first day
Two paid attractions, one free, all walkable from the centre
Very long day, early start, plan nothing for the evening
Beaches, shopping, parklands, or the McLaren Vale
The drive east towards the Limestone Coast, or Monarto Safari Park
Kangaroo Island in particular is a fourteen hour day, and putting it next to the Barossa will leave you flat for the rest of the week.
You could quite easily visit Adelaide CBD for a day and not have to spend a penny on attractions. This was a great introduction to the city, especially as a solo traveller who was a little budget conscious. There are the free museums, the Park Lands, the Botanic Garden and even free churches. I’ve written a dedicated guide on How To Spend $0 in Adelaide.
There are three attractions I would definitely recommend booking within the city.
As is the Love Travel Planning way, make sure the first thing you do is go on on the Adelaide guided walking tour, as this will help orient you for the rest of the week.
The Adelaide CBD Tour was a great introduction into the city. The tour is only 90 minutes on foot around the centre, starting at the Mall’s Balls and taking in Adelaide Arcade, Rundle Mall, Parliament House and the Town Hall before finishing at Adelaide Central Market. You cover a lot of ground you would otherwise walk past without noticing, including lanes and arcades that only work on foot, and you get it all explained by somebody who grew up here. Book it for your first morning.
The Adelaide Oval Tour was one of the more interesting things I did in South Australia, and I follow neither cricket nor Australian rules football. It works because it is really a building tour – three eras of stadium stacked on top of each other, a heritage listed scoreboard that has not changed in a century, and a walk out to the boundary through the player’s race.
Adelaide Zoo is compact enough to do in a couple hours and is home to the only Giant Pandas in Australia. The pandas changed over at the end of 2024, but there are still two at the zoo – almost like a change of guard at Buckingham Palace.
The Barossa is roughly an hour north east of the city and it is the easiest of the two big day trips.
A guided tour is the sensible way to do it, because you cannot taste wine and drive. A full day gets you three or four cellar doors, lunch, and stops at the lookpits and the Avenue of Palms along the way. Going with a smaller operator that visits family wineries rather than big names is what made mine extra special.
The valley is one of the oldest wine regions in the world still growing on original European rootstock, because South Australia’ s nineteenth century quarantine rules kept phylloxera out. That is why Barossa Shiraz tastes the way it does.
This is the big one, and it is a long day – a coach transfer, a ferry crossing, a full day on the island, and the same again coming back.
But, the tour does well to incorporate a lot in a small amount of time. For example, Seal bay where you can see endangered Australian sea lion colonies from a boardwalk or, if the day allows, from the beach itself with a ranger. Then Flinders Chase National Park and Admirals Arch, with fur seals in the water below a natural rock arch, and a wildlife park on the way back to the ferry.
If you have the time to stay two nights on the island instead, do that. If you do not, the day trip is still worth every one of its fourteen hours.
Adelaide gets a pretty bad wrap from its Australian neighbours, but I can tell you for a fact, that Adelaide’s food scene is considerably better value than Sydney or Melbourne, while being as high in quality.
Adelaide is a working city, so after 5pm many of the CBD restaurants tend to fill up quite quickly. I had a table at Osteria Oggi at half four, which felt absurd at the time, but was the right call. I had my main course within 20 minutes and the place was filling up as I left. Book the popular dinner spots as far ahead as you can, particularly Thursday to Saturday.
Feel free to skip this paragraph if you’re not an allergy sufferer! I travel with a severe nut allergy and Adelaide on a whole, handled it well. Osteria Oggi cooks from scratch, keeps no peanuts on the premises and uses nuts only as a garnish, which is about as good as it gets when you are eating out alone. Tour operators and their lunch venues were equally careful, provided the allergy went in at booking rather than being mentioned on the day.
The places that follow are recommendations I collected from tour guides and other travellers rather than restaurants I have eaten at and tested for allergies myself. Osteria Oggi is the only exception.
If you have a food allergy, do not treat this as an allergy‑safe list. Check the venue directly, and check TrustDiner, the community review platform where diners with allergies rate how restaurants actually handled them. Bear in mind that its Australian coverage is still young, so Adelaide entries are a little thin (I tried my best!)
Coffee to start: Exchange Specialty Coffee in the East End of espresso and filter or My Kingdom for a Horse if you want house‑roasted coffee alongside a proper brunch.
Lunch: Adelaide Central Market, which is as much of an attraction as a meal. Lucia’s has been serving pasta and pizza there since the 1950’s, and the delis and produce stalls around it, including the well‑known cheese counter, make grazing easy and cheap.
Dinner: Osteria Oggi for polished Italian, or Golden Boy if you don’t have a nut allergy and would rather have a lively modern Thai.
Coffee and brunch: Hey Jupiter for Parisian‑style coffee and pastries in a courtyard, or Peter Rabbit for a garden setting and a generous plate.
Lunch: The Peel Street and Leigh Street laneways, where Gondola Gondola does shareable Southeast Asian plates and there is plenty else within a few doors.
Dinner: Omada for modern Greek grilling, or Africola for bold South African cooking over wood fire. Adricola’s set menu is the value option there.
Coffee: Deaux Coffee or Elementary Coffee, both focused specialty places.
Best value in the city: Parwana Afghan Kitchen, which comes up again and again in conversation. Worth knowing that the original sits a short ride west of the centre rather than in the CBD, though there is a smaller city offshoot if you would rather stay central.
If you want one big night: Arkhe cooks over open fire with a strong local produce focus, and Restaurant Botanic does a tasting menu in the Botanic Garden itself, which pairs neatly with a morning in the gardens. Book both well ahead.
There is plenty in and around Rundle Mall, and Mitico was the best I had. Almost all the above is a walkable or a short ride within the CBD, and East End, so it slots naturally around the Rundle Mall, Central Market, and laneway routes.
The city of Adelaide is calm, green, walkable and well fed, giving you two free world-class institutions and a couple of very good attractions. Meaning you can have two solid days of exploration. What turns it into a great week is everything within reach of it – the Barossa, Kangaroo Island, the hills, the coast, and the road heading east towards the Limestone Coast.
Although I travelled Adelaide solo, I was thinking about how families would enjoy the city. I believe that it would work well with young children. The pace is unhurried, the city centre is compact and green enough that nobody is being marched along a dual carriageway, and the zoo, the Oval, and the Parklands are all within easy reach of each other.
There are plenty of accommodation options in and around the centre across a range of budgets, and enough variety in the day trips to fill a week without anybody getting bored. Kangaroo Island is the one to think about carefully here, as it is a very long day for small children.
Walking is your best method of transport within the CBD, as it is compact, flat, and pleasant. The parklands means there is also a lot of green spaces to walk around too. There are plenty of Uber’s in and around the city, although I did struggle a couple of times to get one from my Airbnb to the city centre.
Firstly, the rush hour traffic is far worse than the size of the city would allow, and moving from outside the CBD into the centre for a morning tour is a bad plan. As I found out when I was trying to get from my Airbnb in Torrensville to a CBD tour on time.
Secondly, the speed cameras in South Australia are grey and are not signposted the way they are in Western Australia. If you have arrived from Perth, be careful on the roads!
For the two big day trips, let someone else (preferably a tour guide) drive. Both are long days and neither is improved by you being behind the wheel.
Because I only gave myself a week in Adelaide, I had to miss some of the big ticket excursions and explorations. If I came back, preferably in Autumn, these are the things I’d add to my itinerary:
Glenelg and the beaches: Adelaide has an excellent coastline which I didn’t touch at all. It wasn’t until I got to Robe, a week later did I finally get to enjoy the sea.
The Adelaide Hills: We went through them on the way to the Barossa and saw two wild emus and hundreds of kangaroos. I’d dedicated a day of travelling around the Adelaide Hills on my return - it looked stunning.
Monarto Safari Park: Out towards Murray Bridge and run by the same organisation as Adelaide Zoo. I planned to go and could not, because it was closed at the time due to wildfires and extreme heat in the area.
Cleland Wildlife Park: Recommended by my Airbnb host, was on the list but ran out of time.
In closing
Adelaide doesn’t deserve the bad wrap it gets, I thoroughly enjoyed it!
There are plenty of things to do in the city, just don’t expect to get lost in the rhythm of the place.
It’s a very peaceful way to begin your travels down to the Great Ocean Road.
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