Explore Sydney

St Mary's Cathedral is the seat of the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney and stands on College Street beside Hyde Park. William Wardell designed the Gothic Revival church in golden sandstone; it was built from 1866 to 1928, and its two southern spires were only added in 2000. Inside are stained glass windows and a decorated crypt completed in 1961.

The Queen Victoria Building is a Romanesque Revival building designed by George McRae and built between 1893 and 1898 as a city market. It fills a whole block of George Street, 190 metres long and topped by copper domes, and after decades of other uses and decay it was restored in the late 20th century as an arcade of shops and cafés.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales is the state art museum in The Domain, founded in 1872. Its sandstone main building by the government architect Walter Liberty Vernon opened in stages from 1897, and the Naala Badu building by the Japanese firm SANAA was added to the north in 2022. The collection covers Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Asian and European art.

The Australian Museum, founded in 1827, is the oldest natural history museum in Australia and stands at the corner of William and College streets, opposite Hyde Park. Its galleries cover zoology, minerals, palaeontology and anthropology, with dinosaur skeletons, Australian animals and First Nations and Pacific collections, beside changing exhibitions.

The Royal Botanic Garden Sydney opened in 1816 and is the oldest scientific institution in Australia. Its 30 hectares wrap around Farm Cove on the harbour, next to the Sydney Opera House, with lawns, the Main Pond, the Fernery and themed plant collections, and the garden also keeps a herbarium and the glasshouse called The Calyx.

Sydney Fish Market is the city's wholesale seafood market and working fishing port. In January 2026 it moved from its 1966 site to a new building beside it on Blackwattle Bay in Glebe, designed by the Danish firm 3XN under a large timber roof. A daily auction trades over 50 tonnes of seafood, and retailers sell fresh fish and meals along a waterfront promenade.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge is a steel arch bridge that carries road, rail, cycle and foot traffic across Sydney Harbour between the city centre and the North Shore. Built by the British firm Dorman Long under the engineer John Bradfield and opened in 1932, it rises 134 metres above the water. A public footway runs along its eastern side.

Bondi Beach is a curved sandy beach on the Pacific coast, seven kilometres east of central Sydney. Lifeguards patrol the sand, surfers use the breaks along it, and a grassy park and promenade run behind it; the Bondi Icebergs ocean pool sits at the southern end, where the coastal walk to Coogee begins.

Manly Beach is the ocean beach of Manly, on Sydney's Northern Beaches, running from Queenscliff in the north through North Steyne to South Steyne. A promenade lined with Norfolk Island pines follows the sand, lifeguards patrol it, and the pedestrian Corso leads across to Manly Wharf, where ferries from Circular Quay arrive.