50 km South of Adelaide. A pleasant, largely unspoiled, holiday region with some excellent beaches.

The French explorer Baudin arrived here in the early years of 19thC and the peninsula is named after the French marine expert Charles-Pierre Fleurieu.

The earliest settlers set up as pirates and smugglers, but this thriving business dwindled when the place went legitimate with the establishment of a whaling station at Encounter Bay in 1837. Nowadays, the coastline settlements are mainly devoted to low-key tourism (with only the occasional bed-and-breakfast spot run by a pirate); inland there are thriving vineyards.

The coastline of the peninsula has cliffs and some excellent sandy beaches with plenty of surf. One of these beaches, Maslin (north stretch of Gulf St Vincent shoreline) accounts for the Fleurieu Peninsula’s other entry in the history books. It is said to be Australia’s first official nudist beach. (Though if Fleurieu was still around, he might well have brought to notice a few earlier Aborigine bathing spots.)

Several of the small towns along the coast have pleasant colonial features. At Victoria Harbour on Encounter Bay there are whales; Goolwa is on Lake Alexandrina close by the mouth of the Murray River and the Coorong (see The Coorong National Park); and at Cape Jervis on the tip of the peninsula you can catch the ferry to Kangaroo Island (see separate entry).