Horsham
Population: 14,000
Distances:
Little Desert National Park - 40kms
Grampians National Park - 50kms
Mt Arapiles - 32kms
Melbourne - 300kms
Adelaide - 450kms
Horsham is the main service town and the centre of the Wimmera District of western Victoria. The town is about 300 km west of Melbourne.
Horsham is the main commercial centre for a region that is mostly devoted to broad acre farming and large-scale agriculture. It is located on a flat plain with the Wimmera River flowing through the town.
Mark Twain, the famous American author of Huckleberry Finn visited the town in 1890 and described it as a 'country town, peaceful, inviting, full of snug homes, with garden plots and plenty of shrubbery and flowers'. Horsham is located among the open plains of the Wimmera's cereal cropping industry. Wheat, wool, cereals and tourism are among its most important industries as well as retail.
Horsham is surrounded by popular tourist attractions such as the:
Little Desert - Here in the Little Desert - a desert in name only - you can discover how many species of plants and animals have succeeded, on poor soils with little water, in creating a kind of arid landscape where survival depends on maintaining a delicate balance of natural forces.
The Grampians - The Grampians mountain range to the south is an extraordinarily rugged mountain outcrop at the western edge of the Great Dividing Range. The 167,000- hectare Grampians National Park is one of the State's most popular holiday destinations and is home for almost a third of Victoria's plant species.
Mt Arapiles, near Natimuk is regarded as one of the best rock climbing sites in the world. It is an imposing outcrop of rock rising sharply from the plains of the Wimmera to 230 metres. There are over a thousand climbs on offer among the many rock formations around the peak. Being only half an hour's drive from Horsham it is also a popular spot with locals who often go out there for a BBQ or to watch the sunset.
