Southwest (Tasmania)

Southwest National Park occupies the south-west of Tasmania and, at more than 6,180 km², is the largest national park in the state. It borders Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers to the north and Hartz Mountains to the east, and together they form a practically uninhabited territory of glaciated mountains, heathland, wild rivers and a coast exposed to the Southern Ocean.

It is the principal component of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, designated by UNESCO in December 1982 and extended in 1989 and again during the 2010s. The whole covers around 1.58 million hectares, between a fifth and a third of the island's area depending on the delimitation, and takes in seven national parks: besides Southwest, Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair, Mount Field, Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers, Walls of Jerusalem, Mole Creek Karst and Hartz Mountains, along with numerous reserves.

It is one of the three largest cool temperate wilderness areas left in the southern hemisphere. It preserves most of the temperate rainforest surviving in Australia, with relict species originating in the supercontinent Gondwana, such as the southern beeches of the genus Nothofagus, alongside tall eucalypt forests that include some of the tallest flowering plants on the planet. To that are added glaciated terrain, alpine grassland, peat bogs, high lakes and extensive limestone cave systems with traces of human occupation some 20,000 years old, evidence of Aboriginal presence during the last glaciation.