Greenest suburbs in Cairns

Whitfield tops the ranking with about 322 hectares of parkland within a kilometre of the suburb centre, across 8 separate parks. The 15 listed run from about 322 hectares down to 13. Parkland means public parks, gardens and reserves mapped in OpenStreetMap, measured as area rather than as a count of parks. It is not a measure of tree cover, so a suburb of large private gardens can be leafy without appearing here. These 15 suburbs came from a field of 30 eligible Cairns suburbs.

The total area of parks, gardens and nature reserves whose centre sits within 1,000 m of the centre of the suburb. It is a measure of parkland you could walk to, not of tree cover: a leafy street of large private gardens has no parkland in it and does not score.

Because counting parks rates a dog park and a nature reserve the same. Measured across Australia in August 2026, Canberra had 394 park features within 25 km of its centre against Sydney's 3,388 — but 95.4 km2 of park area against Sydney's 71.9. Ranking on counts would have called the bush capital the least green city in the country.

It is shown on every row and breaks ties, but it does not otherwise change the order. A weighted version was tried and dropped: scores are percentile ranks, which record position rather than size, so a suburb with three times the parkland of another gains only a point or two — and a factor meant to be minor ended up deciding the list.

Each park counts for at most 3.14 km2, which is the area of the 1,000 m circle itself. A reserve larger than everything within walking distance of you cannot give you more green space than that area holds, and without the limit a single large reserve on the edge of the ring would decide the whole ranking.

Most likely it has private gardens and street trees rather than public parkland, or its parks sit past the ring measured from the suburb centre. Park boundaries come from OpenStreetMap, so a park that has not been mapped is a park this ranking cannot see.