Adelaide 3-Day Itinerary: The Perfect Long Weekend in South Australia

Adelaide is Australia's most underrated city — a planned colonial grid of wide streets and parklands surrounding a compact, walkable city centre that contains more fine food, wine, and cultural experiences per square kilometre than any city its size anywhere in the country. Begin day one with the Central Market, which has operated since 1869 and is the finest covered food market in Australia — a labyrinth of produce stalls, deli counters, fishmongers, specialty cheese shops, and coffee roasters that reflects South Australia's extraordinary food culture. Walk north through the city grid to the Art Gallery of South Australia, whose permanent collection includes important works from every period of Australian art alongside European masters, and is entirely free. The adjacent South Australian Museum holds the world's largest collection of Aboriginal Australian cultural artefacts — an extraordinary and sobering collection presented with genuine care for the communities whose heritage it holds.

Day two belongs to the Adelaide Hills and the Barossa. The Adelaide Hills, beginning just 15 minutes east of the CBD, comprise a series of charming villages — Hahndorf, Stirling, Crafers — set in a landscape of orchards, vineyards, and cool-climate gardens that provided European settlers with a landscape that recalled home. Hahndorf is Australia's oldest surviving German settlement, with a main street of 19th-century buildings now housing artisan food producers, galleries, and restaurants. Drive north through the Hills to the Barossa Valley, one of Australia's most important wine regions, where Penfolds, Jacob's Creek, and Seppeltsfield are among the dozens of cellar doors offering tastings in a landscape of old-growth vineyards and stone winery buildings that dates to the 1840s.

On day three, explore Glenelg — Adelaide's seaside suburb — for a morning on the beach and lunch at one of the jetty area's seafood restaurants, then return via the tram (the only remaining tram line in Adelaide, and free in the city centre) for an afternoon in the Parklands. Botanic Garden's First Creek Wetland and the Bicentennial Conservatory — the largest greenhouse in the Southern Hemisphere — are free highlights of a park system that wraps entirely around the Adelaide city grid in a band of green that the founder, Colonel William Light, planned in 1836. End with dinner in the East End restaurant district or the Peel Street laneway strip, where Adelaide's acclaimed chefs produce some of the finest produce-driven cooking in Australia.