Litchfield National Park
Waterfalls and Termite Cathedrals South of Darwin
On the lands of the Werat people.
schedule 1 min read / Updated Apr 2026
An hour and a half south of Darwin, Litchfield National Park is the locals' favourite swimming-hole national park. Florence Falls, Wangi Falls, and Buley Rockhole are crocodile-free in the dry season and are warm enough to swim in year-round.
Litchfield National Park covers around 1,500 square kilometres of the Tabletop Range, an escarpment of weathered sandstone south-west of Darwin. The park is famous for its waterfalls and the rock pools at their base, which are unusual in northern Australia for being safe to swim in (no saltwater crocodiles can climb the escarpment to reach them in the dry season).
The headline swimming sites are Florence Falls (a twin waterfall dropping into a deep monsoon-forest pool, with a steep set of stairs down), Buley Rockhole (a series of small waterfall pools cascading down the rock), and Wangi Falls (the largest, with an easy walking access to the swimming area).
The magnetic termite mounds, just inside the park entrance, are flat slab-shaped mounds up to 2 metres tall, all aligned north-south. The orientation acts as climate control, with the broad faces catching the cooler morning and afternoon sun and the thin edges minimising the midday heat. They are one of the strangest sights in the Top End.
The park is reached from Darwin via the Stuart Highway and is a standard day trip.
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Scenic views
Lookouts near Litchfield National Park.
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Attribution
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- Litchfield National Park (AU), Florence Creek -- 2019 -- 374... · Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Litchfield National Park (AU), Florence Creek -- 2019 -- 374... · Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0
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