Uluru

Rising 348 metres above the surrounding desert and extending an estimated 2.5 kilometres underground, Uluru is sacred to the Anangu, the Aboriginal traditional owners of the region, as a physical embodiment of Tjukurpa — the body of law, religion, and history that describes how ancestral beings created the landscape during the creation period. Specific caves, fissures, waterholes, and rock formations around Uluru's base correspond to particular Tjukurpa narratives, including the battle between the Kuniya (woma python woman) and the Liru (poisonous snake men), and are recounted by Anangu elders as part of an oral tradition tens of thousands of years old.

Climbing Uluru — long opposed by the Anangu, for whom the climb route crosses a sacred path — was formally banned by the site's joint management board in October 2019, more than three decades after ownership of the site was returned to the Anangu in 1985 and immediately leased back to the Australian government as a national park. Visitors and station workers have for decades reported unexplained lights moving around the rock at night and compass anomalies in the surrounding desert, though no scientific survey has substantiated a physical cause distinct from the area's known geology and atmospheric conditions.