Adelaide and Surrounds Info
Introduction
Ranking as the fifth largest city in Australia and serving as the state capital of South Australia, Adelaide is an incredibly livable and pleasant city that has a little over one million inhabitants, many of whom are of immigrants communities. With an incredibly vibrant cultural and culinary scene, this mid-sized urban center lies along the eastern shore of the Gulf St. Vincent, ensconced between this body of water and the Mount Lofty Ranges, north of the Fleurieu Peninsula.
There is an abundance of park land surrounding the city, a strategic decision that dates all the way back to the city's founder and initial urban planner, Colonel William Light—whose visionary plan for this now-bustling, intelligently designed city is referred to (lovingly) as “Light's Vision.” Though his designs seemed quite futuristic for the 1830s and 1840s, being met with considerable resistance by the early settlers and other (rival) bureaucrats, they have over the course of time yielded many crucial benefits that have given Adelaide a strong competitive edge as well as a high degree of maneuverability: his grid design and wide avenues have made traffic flow incredibly easy, a factor which would only become apparent many years and indeed decades after this visionary's death, and the ring of green area surrounding the city, known as the Adelaide Parklands, has a soothing effect on the collective psyche.
Visiting Adelaide
Any visit to this vibrant city absolutely must include a couple of stops at the more renowned and acclaimed cultural centers, of which there are many—indeed, it is surprising that a city of less than two million persons should have such an active and established cultural scene. Probably the most significant historical development that led to the flourishing of the city's cultural scene was the series of decisions made by Premier Don Dunstan in the 1970s, who lifted or modified several “code of conduct” and heavily Puritanical restrictions on the arts and cultural world in Australia. The result was the proliferation of a wide variety of events and festivals, of which the Fringe Festival and the Adelaide Festival of Arts have traditionally been the most significant and heavily visited. In addition to these two exceptional events, the city hosts a slew of other entertaining cultural and artsy affairs, among which are included: the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Film Festival, Writers' Week, Festival of Ideas, and Tasting Australia.
This last festival is held partly in honor of the excellent wines being produced in the Barossa Valley just outside the city (obviously in addition to the many other wine regions of the country), whose wineries were established in the 19th century by German immigrants fleeing religious persecution in Europe who brought vine clippings with them from their native orchards. They found in this part of Australia an ideal climate and soil mixture for red wines, the Shiraz grape in particular. Since then, the Barossa Valley has become a world-class wine producer, with several winery names now being commonly recognized and highly appreciated on the global viticulture scene.
History of Adelaide
History has it that Colonel William Light, the first surveyor in this area and the eventual city designer of this capital city, found the inspiration for his very modern plans in the Sicilian city of Catania, where he had observed with great admiration a particular central intersection of two very broad avenues that crossed each other at perfect right angles, with the roads creating a perfectly oriented compass bearing in the heart of the city. With that acknowledgement, it is also necessary to state that his ideas far exceeded anything which he had observed elsewhere, and the results of his plans gave Australia one of the most conceptually brilliant urban settings in existence, globally. Despite the brilliance of its initial architect, the city experienced what might be referred to as growing pains as it discovered exactly what its primary industries would be and where it would get its work force from; much later, a government sponsored immigration program in the mid-20th century introduced a large amount of mostly European immigrants, boosting the local population considerably. In addition, many Asian (Vietnamese in particular) and African immigrants have arrived here, spicing up the multicultural array that much more. As mentioned earlier, in the 1970s there was a considerable cultural revolution in the city, turning it into a national leader of the arts, a position which it enjoys to the present day.