Behind the towers the Gold Coast is Yugambeh Country, a 23-million-year-old volcanic caldera and a coast Cook charted in 1770. Three days trace creation stories at Jellurgal, Anzac dawn stone at Elephant Rock, and Queensland's first national park.
Yugambeh-owned centre at the foot of Jellurgal (Burleigh Hill), telling the Jabreen creation story of how the headland was formed. Exhibition space is free; the guided Jellurgal Walkabout runs weekday mornings and must be booked ahead.
The basalt headland is an eroded flank of the Tweed shield volcano, active 23 million years ago. The Oceanview Track passes columnar basalt cliffs and the midden-rich foreshore where Yugambeh families camped and fished for millennia.
A plateau lookout at 1,000 metres, reached through a grove of Antarctic beech trees more than 2,000 years old — living Gondwanan relics inside the World Heritage listing. On clear days the view runs to Wollumbin and the full caldera rim.
A basalt cave carved by Cave Creek inside the Tweed caldera, roofed by a collapsed rock arch. The 1km circuit is the hinterland's classic dusk walk, and glow-worms light the cave chamber once the light goes.
The memorial marks where Cook charted and named Point Danger on 16 May 1770. Its centrepiece is a capstan cast from ballast the Endeavour jettisoned after grounding on the Barrier Reef, under the 1971 bicentenary laser lighthouse.
The 1917 Kirra Hill State School, saved from demolition and now a community and cultural centre with local history displays. It looks straight down on the beach named for the schooner Coolangatta, wrecked on this shore in 1846.
Began in 1947 when beekeeper Alex Griffiths fed wild rainbow lorikeets to keep them off his gladioli, and was gifted to the National Trust of Queensland in 1976. The twice-daily lorikeet feed has run continuously ever since.
The rock above Currumbin Beach carries the memorial stone for one of Australia's largest Anzac dawn services, run by the Currumbin RSL since 1970 and now drawing over 25,000 people to the sand below. Steps and stone are open year-round.
A timber-getters' village inland of Burleigh, grown around the Wallaby Hotel — licensed since 1901 and the oldest continuously trading pub on the Gold Coast. The School of Arts hall and 1920s shopfronts still line Railway Street.
Run by the Tamborine Mountain Historical Society, the centre keeps the plateau's cedar-cutting and dairying record: bullock harness, a relocated slab cottage, and the 1870s selection maps that first opened the mountain to settlers.
Gazetted on 28 March 1908 as Queensland's first national park and among the earliest in Australia. The 3.1km circuit drops off the western rim through piccabeen palm groves and seasonal volcanic lagoons to the falls lookout.
The 1934 Spanish Mission pavilion is heritage-listed and the last real piece of inter-war Gold Coast beach architecture, built when Southport was a genteel resort town and the strip to the south was still officially named Elston.