Explore Sydney

Hyde Park Barracks is a brick building on Macquarie Street designed by the convict architect Francis Greenway and built in 1817–1819 to house convict men and boys. It later served as an immigration depot for women and as courts, and is now a museum of convict and colonial history; it is one of the 11 Australian Convict Sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

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 Museum of Contemporary Art Australia shows contemporary art, mostly by Australian artists, in the former Maritime Services Board building, an Art Deco sandstone block on the western side of Circular Quay in The Rocks. The museum opened in 1991, and a modern wing designed by Sam Marshall was added in 2012; its exhibitions change through the year.

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.

The Australian National Maritime Museum is a federal museum on Pyrmont Bay in Darling Harbour, opened in 1991 in a building with sail-like roofs by Philip Cox. Its galleries cover Indigenous Australians and the sea, exploration, migration and the navy, and moored outside are the destroyer HMAS Vampire, the submarine HMAS Onslow and a replica of HMB Endeavour.

Taronga Zoo opened in 1916 on the northern shore of Sydney Harbour in Mosman, on the Country of the Cammeraigal people. Its terraced grounds hold about 350 species, from koalas and platypuses to Asian elephants and giraffes, with keeper talks through the day and views back across the harbour to the city.