Perth
Western Australia's sun-drenched and isolated capital
One of the most isolated major cities on earth, Perth basks on the banks of the Swan River on Australia's remote west coast, closer to Southeast Asia than to Sydney. The sun-drenched capital of Western Australia, home to more than two million people, owes its wealth to the vast mineral and gas riches of the surrounding state. A relaxed, outdoorsy city of beaches, parklands, and a Mediterranean climate, Perth pairs gleaming towers built on mining money with an enviable lifestyle of long, hot summers and reliable blue skies.
The city spreads along the Swan River as it winds toward the Indian Ocean, fronted by a string of white-sand surf beaches and backed by the low wooded scarp of the Darling Range. Kings Park, one of the largest inner-city parks in the world, overlooks the river and downtown. The climate is dry and Mediterranean, with hot, rainless summers cooled in the afternoon by a reliable sea breeze the locals call the Fremantle Doctor, and mild, wetter winters that green the surrounding bushland.
The British founded Perth in 1829 as the Swan River Colony, the first free settlement on the continent, on the lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people. Slow to grow at first, the city boomed after gold was discovered inland in the 1890s, and again in successive resources booms that turned Western Australia into a mining giant. Today Perth is the service and financial hub for that vast extractive economy, a wealthy, spread-out city whose fortunes rise and fall with the global appetite for iron ore and gas.