Banana farm, sugar cane farm. Banana farm, sugar cane farm. Sugar refinery.
The further north you follow the Bruce Highway, the coastal highway connecting Brisbane to Far North Queensland, the steadier the beat of the surrounding landscape becomes. The year-round sunshine and regular rains are just that good for growing bananas and sugar cane. An hour or two drive out of Cairns, the two crops seem to occupy every flat bit of land there is.
It’s an illusion, really. Two vast natural barriers – the glittering Coral Sea to the east, and a string of mountains to the west – have kept agriculture confined to a narrow corridor that’s just 30 kilometres across at its widest. The Bruce Highway runs straight down the middle, below the imposing 1600-metre peaks of Bartle Frere and Bellenden Ker, Queensland’s two highest mountains.
Among the ubiquitous farms and sugar factories, there’s a smaller number of caravan parks, fish’n’chip shops and breezy pubs – exactly the kind of things you expect to find in a tropical paradise like this. But Paronella Park, a heritage-listed Spanish castle? It’s a total non-sequitur.
The park’s visionary, José Paronella, came to Australia in 1913. By 1929 he’d amassed a sizeable fortune cutting sugar cane, and later buying and reselling farms. He bought 13 acres of untouched rainforest for £120 and started building a reproduction of the castles he remembered from his childhood in Catalonia. As you do.
Finished in 1935, the park contained a museum, a ballroom-slash-cinema, a swimming pool, tea gardens, two clay tennis courts, grand staircases, tree-lined promenades and a hydro-electric plant to power the whole estate (huge for the time – Cairns was electrified only 10 years earlier). It was the family home for José, his wife Margarita and their two kids, but opened to the public every weekend for movie screenings, dances and general gaiety.
Life was good for a few decades. The children, Joe and Teresa, grew up, married and had kids of their own. When José and Margarita passed away, Joe and his wife Val took over Paronella and added their own flourishes, including an elaborate gravity-fed fountain that’s still working today.
But then disaster struck – over and over and over. Three floods devastated the area in an eight-year period, pushing the family to sell up in 1977, presumably overwhelmed by the scope of maintenance and repairs.
For all his smarts and vision, José was a little naive to build Paronella Park out of reinforced concrete rendered in a mixture of clay and cement. In Spain’s dry, hot climate it’d probably have held up fine. But in Far North Queensland’s humid rainforest, the water began eroding the walls almost as soon as they were erected, never mind floods.
Current owners Mark and Judy Evans grew up in Perth and discovered the site in ’93, on a trip around Australia. The park’s buildings were in much the same condition as they are today: crumbling and dilapidated, yet still spectacular in their grandeur. You might recognise them from 2018 film Celeste. The couple put in an offer almost immediately. They’ve been here ever since, unbeaten by yet another flood, plus two big cyclones (Larry and Yasi).
Mark and Judy see the park as a work of art – one worthy of maintaining and preserving, but never artificially rebuilding. They’ve added a cafe and gift shop, tidied up dirt paths and unsafe staircases, and built on the existing museum’s collection of photographs and other ephemera. When you pull into the car park, one of them is likely to be there, welcoming you in.
Visitors are free to wander the park’s shady, winding pathways, taking selfies by the waterfall and feeding turtles in the creeks with the provided pellets. But Paronella is best experienced alongside one of the park’s knowledgeable and well-trained guides, who bring the crumbling ruins to life with stories about the swinging high society days – like the time a disco ball was imported from the United States to hang in the ballroom at enormous cost.
The original was lost in yet another major disaster: a 1979 fire. The giant one that now hangs from a steel rig in the roofless ballroom was donated by a regular visitor, Russ Hill. It’s a non-sequitur inside a non-sequitur, and a total delight in banana-cane country.
The writer travelled to Paronella Park as a guest of Tourism Tropical North Queensland
