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The land on which Cairns stands originally belonged to the Yidinji Walubarra people, who still today recognize indigenous property rights in the area. The territory on which the city was built is known in the Yidiny language as Gimuy.



In 1770, James Cook drew the first map of the future site of Cairns, calling it Trinity Bay. Further more exhaustive investigations by the expeditions of various officers 100 years later established its potential to develop a port.



Cairns was founded in 1876, pressed by the need to export gold discovered on the plateaus west of the entrance. The site was predominantly mangrove and sandy. The swamps were cleaned up by the workers and where the sand was supposed to go was filled with dried mud, sawdust from local sawmills and ballast from a quarry on Edge Hill. Waste collected from the construction of a railroad for Herberton on the Atherton Plateau, a project that began in 1886, was also employed. The railroad opened up land that was later used for agriculture in the lowlands (sugar cane, corn , rice, bananas, pineapples) and for the production of fruits and dairy in the plateau. The success of local agriculture helped Cairns establish itself as a port, and the creation of a port board in 1906 helped maintain its economic future.



During World War II, Cairns was used by Allied forces as a base for staging operations in the Pacific. After WWII, Cairns slowly reinvented itself as a resort. The opening of Cairns International Airport in 1984 and the Cairns Convention Center building established the city's overseas reputation as an attractive destination for tourism and business conference markets.





Cairns is a tourist city located in the northeast of Australia, in the state of Queensland. It is located 1,700 kilometers from Brisbane and about 2,420 kilometers from Sydney by road. It has a population of 122,731 inhabitants according to the 2006 census. Cairns is a popular destination for foreign tourists due to its tropical climate and its proximity to many attractions. The Great Barrier Reef is one of them and is less than an hour by boat. Daintree National Park and the Cape of Tribulation, 130 km north of Cairns, are famous areas to be surrounded by rainforests. That is why it is an important tourist center and a city very visited by backpackers and tourists in general, who usually start their routes here to Cooktown, the Cape York peninsula and the Atherton Plateau. In fact, the area receives more than two million national and international tourists a year.



The city is named after William Wellington Cairns (former Governor of Queensland). It was formed to serve miners heading for the Hodgkinson River Gold Mine, but was set back in development by the discovery of an easier route through Port Douglas. It later became a major port for the export of sugar cane, gold, metals, minerals, and agricultural products from the surrounding and coastal areas of the Atherton Plateau region.

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