The Darling Downs is a farming region on the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range in southern Queensland, Australia. The downs are to the west of South East Queensland and are one of eleven major regions of Queensland. The largest City in the area is Toowoomba. 
The region was named after the then Governor of New South Wales, Ralph Darling by Allan Cunningham, an early Australian explorer. The landscape is dominated by rolling hills covered by pastures of many different vegetables, legumes and other crops including cotton, wheat, barley and sorghum. Between the farmlands there are long stretches of crisscrossing roads, bushy ridges, winding creeks and many herds of cattle. There are farms with beef and dairy cattle, pigs, sheep and lamb stock. Other notable features include irrigation systems, windmills serving as bore pumps to get water from the Great Artesian Basin, light planes crop-dusting, a rusty old woolshed and other scattered remnants from a bygone era of early exploration and settlement. It is in the drainage basin of the Condamine River and Maranoa River and tributaries. On the northern boundaries of the Downs are the Bunya Mountains and the Bunya Mountains National Park. The region to the north is the South Burnett and the Maranoa lies to the west. A section of the western downs lies over coal deposits of the Surat Basin. Towards the coast, the mountains of the Scenic Rim form the headwaters of the westward flowing Condamine. Part of the Darling Downs, which includes the towns of Allora, Clifton, Warwick, Killarney and the rocky district in the south known as the Granite Belt, is known as the Southern Downs. The Southern Downs is classed as a region of the Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia. The phrase is also used to define political boundaries and in the promotion of tourism in the area. The Dumaresq and the MacIntyre are found in this part of the region. The region is popular with tourists because of its many natural and heritage attractions, including the Goomburra State Forest, Cunningham's Gap, Spicer's Gap and the Queen Mary Falls near Killarney in the Main Range National Park.
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