Most visitors see Burra's mine and Market Square and turn for home. Point the car outward instead: the hinterland holds fossil gorges, silo art, ghost towns and an album cover.
Burra's copper story pulls visitors into town - and most stay there, circling the mine, the dugouts and Market Square. But the country around Burra is its own destination, and a day's loop through the hinterland turns up wonders the copper rush never touched.
Where giants grazed
Start 15 kilometres east at Red Banks Conservation Park, where Baldina Creek has carved ochre cliffs and gorges out of the plains. Palaeontologists rank this among Australia's richest megafauna sites: erosion still exposes the fossils of diprotodon - the two-tonne giant wombat - alongside marsupial lions and giant kangaroos that grazed here until about 65,000 years ago. The Landscapes of Change walk tells the story; wombats and kangaroos keep the modern end of the bargain.
Water in dry country
South of town, Burra Creek Gorge at Worlds End is the hinterland's oasis - permanent waterholes under river red gums, with shaded picnicking and camping. It is the kind of place that makes you recalibrate what this dry country can do.
The roof of the ranges
Northeast of Burra the land climbs to Mount Bryan, at 936 metres the highest point in the entire Mount Lofty Ranges. The Heysen Trail crosses the bare summit on its way to the Flinders, passing the one-room Mount Bryan East school that now shelters hikers. On a clear day the view runs over wind farms and wheat to the edge of the pastoral country.
Ghosts and murals
Back toward town, the stone shells of Hampton trace a whole village laid out in 1857 and emptied by 1960 - streets, cottages and chapel reduced to evocative ruins you can walk through with the Burra Heritage Passport. And on the road between Burra and Mintaro, the wheat town of Farrell Flat painted its last train across a 30-metre grain silo in 2020; the Farrell Flat Silo Art glows for kilometres in the late sun.
One famous farmhouse
Finally, three kilometres north of Burra on the Barrier Highway, pull over (carefully) at Cobb & Co Corner. The lone stone farmhouse in the paddock is the Midnight Oil House, photographed by Ken Duncan for the cover of 1987's Diesel and Dust. It is private land - but the photograph is free.
For the town itself, start with Cornwall in the outback: the story of Burra.
