Dhilba Guuranda-Innes National Park

Dhilba Guuranda-Innes National Park covers the south-western tip of Yorke Peninsula, about 284km from Adelaide, where low limestone cliffs, dune beaches and salt lakes front the water at the mouth of Spencer Gulf. The park is co-named for the Narungga people, its Traditional Owners, whose country runs in four clans — Kurnara to the north, Windera to the east, Wari to the west and Dilpa to the south — and whose recorded sites, Traditional Use Zones and Cultural Protection Zones sit across this land and the waters around Marion Bay. It holds the largest area of remnant native vegetation left on Yorke Peninsula, with 333 native plant species, and around the edges of its salt lakes live stromatolites — layered cyanobacterial mats, some carbon-dated to about 3,000 years old — among the few places on earth where living examples survive.

The rest is coast: operating lighthouses at Cape Spencer and West Cape, more than 40 shipwrecks offshore with the rusted iron of the Ethel on its beach, the gypsum-mining ruins of Inneston, and tammar wallabies reintroduced in 2004 after dying out on the mainland.

What to expect

Reviewed 7 November 2026

You come in from the north through Marion Bay, the last town before the park, where the general store, tavern and fuel pumps are the final supplies before the entrance 5.3km away. Pay the $14.40 vehicle entry before you arrive — it can be added to an online accommodation booking or bought separately for a day visit — then follow the sealed road south to Stenhouse Bay, where the visitor information centre opens 10am to 3pm daily and the jetty runs out into the bay. From the Stenhouse Jetty car park the Stenhouse Bay Lookout Walk makes a 2km loop along cliff tops through low closed coastal heath, with views over Investigator Strait to the offshore islands. The sealed main road runs about 26km from the Stenhouse Bay entrance to the far end of the park, with side roads branching to beaches, campgrounds and the two lighthouses. Everything here is reachable in a two-wheel drive, and the internal roads are sealed or well-formed gravel.

West Cape is the first headland stop: the West Cape Headland Circuit is a 1km loop taking about 30 minutes past the stainless-steel lighthouse at the tip, with 360° views over Southern Spencer Gulf Marine Park and out to Wedge and Althorpe islands. Cape Spencer, at the southern edge of the park, carries the second operating lighthouse and the Gulawulgawi Ngunda Nhagu – Cape Spencer Lookout, reached on a 1km return walk from its car park, where the view runs over Investigator Strait and, on a clear day, to Kangaroo Island. In winter, southern right whales pass these cliff tops at Stenhouse Bay and Cape Spencer.

Pondalowie Bay is where the park's beach life concentrates. The Pondalowie Boardwalk runs 1.2km return from the Pondalowie Beach Access Carpark over the sand dunes to the surf break via a long viewing platform, and that break is why surfers tow boards down from Adelaide. Two campgrounds sit behind the dunes: Pondalowie Bay Campground among the mallee with 26 tent-only unpowered sites, and the Pondalowie caravan and trailer ground beside it with 9 large caravan sites and 16 smaller camper trailer ones, both with long-drop toilets and fire pits outside the fire danger season. The bay curves in a pale sand arc with calm water at its eastern end, so it doubles as the swimming beach, and Chinaman's Hat Island sits offshore in the marine park — the water around it draws divers, while Stenhouse Bay Jetty is the local squid spot. Casuarina campground, 10 unpowered sites, is a short walk from the same beach and break.

The coast carries its history in the open. More than 40 shipwrecks lie off Dhilba Guuranda-Innes and the southern Yorke Peninsula, their stories strung along an interpretive maritime trail, and the best known is the Ethel, driven ashore in a severe storm in 1904 — its rusted iron still lies on the stony beach below the orange cliffs, though how much you see depends on how the sand has moved. Inland, the Inneston Historic Walk makes a 2km loop through the ruins of a close-knit gypsum-mining community, and the Thomson-Pfitzner Plaster Trail follows the old wooden gypsum railway line past interpretive signs. Deep, Inneston and Marion lakes hold geological and palaeontological features on the South Australian Heritage Register, and a salt lake complex here is listed in the Directory of Important Wetlands in Australia.

Wildlife is close and unbothered: tammar wallabies — extinct on the mainland by the 1920s and reintroduced here in 2004 — graze the scrub alongside western grey kangaroos and emus, hooded plovers nest on the beaches, and the malleefowl population is on the rise. The park was proclaimed in 1970 to protect malleefowl and white-bellied whipbird habitat, and it shelters 8 nationally threatened species along with drooping sheoak grassy woodland and coastal saltmarsh. Ospreys breed on the cliffs and dolphins work the inshore water. What the park does not give you is services: there is no fuel inside it, water quality and quantity cannot be guaranteed, mobile coverage is patchy and unreliable especially in low-lying areas, and there are no bins anywhere.