Ningaloo Coast

The Ningaloo Coast was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2011 and protects some 705,000 hectares in the north-west of Western Australia, around the Exmouth peninsula. Its central element is Ningaloo Reef, the largest fringing reef in Australia: unlike the Great Barrier Reef, which runs tens of kilometres offshore, here the coral grows hard against the shore, so that it can be reached by swimming from the beach.

That reef, some 260 kilometres long, holds hundreds of species of coral and fish, and its proximity to deep water explains the phenomenon that has made it world-famous: between March and July, coinciding with the mass coral spawning and the resulting plankton bloom, the largest known aggregation of whale sharks, the biggest fish on the planet, gathers off the coast. They are joined by oceanic manta rays, marine turtles that nest on its beaches and, on their annual migration, humpback whales.

The property is not confined to the sea. On land it includes the karst massif of Cape Range, a limestone chain riddled with caves and fissures that are home to a subterranean fauna of amphipods, isopods and blind fish adapted to total darkness, many of them endemic and without equivalent anywhere else in the world. That combination of reef, coastal karst and stygobitic fauna was decisive in the assessment of the nomination.