Neuseeland

New Zealand was one of the last major landmasses on earth to be settled by humans. Polynesian voyagers arrived around the 13th century, and from them grew Māori culture, with its tribal structures, rich oral traditions …

On 3 February 1931 an earthquake measuring 7.9 devastated Napier and Hastings and claimed 256 lives, New Zealand's worst natural disaster. Napier was rebuilt in the style of its time, and the city is known today for its…

The Māori name Te Tai Rāwhiti means the Coast of the Sunrise, and it fits: this is the first part of the New Zealand mainland to see the sun rise each day. Until the late nineteenth century the area was known as Tūranga…

The region takes its name from the bay, which James Cook named the Bay of Plenty after noticing the abundant food supplies at several Māori villages along its shores, in contrast to what he had seen at Poverty Bay. That…

Northland's defining place in the national story is Waitangi, where New Zealand's founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi, was signed in 1840. Northland iwi hold that Kupe made landfall at the Hokianga, and for that r…

Taranaki takes its name from its defining feature, the stratovolcano Mount Taranaki, whose cone is visible across much of the region. Māori tribes made this their home from the thirteenth century. From about 1823 contac…

In 1840 Jerningham Wakefield purchased 40,000 acres for the New Zealand Company, under circumstances later regarded as dubious, including the site of the town of Petre, which became Whanganui. It was a turning point for…

Wellington became the capital of New Zealand in 1865, the third after Russell and Auckland, and that role has shaped the whole region ever since. Māori knew the area as Te Upoko o te Ika a Māui, the head of Māui's fish,…

During the Last Glacial Maximum, when sea levels were more than a hundred metres lower, most of New Zealand's offshore islands were joined to the mainland. Manawatāwhi was connected only to its neighbouring islets, neve…

In 1840 forty-four Waikato chiefs travelled north to the Manukau Heads and Manukau Harbour to sign the Treaty of Waitangi; three Ngāti Maniapoto chiefs and three Ngāti Haua chiefs signed as well, though most signatories…

On 1 November 2010 the Auckland region became a unitary authority administered by the Auckland Council, replacing the previous regional council and seven local councils. In the same process an area in the south-eastern …

Canterbury's character was written into the land long before people arrived: the greywacke basement rocks of the Southern Alps, the great gravel fans spread out by rain, snow and ice, and the volcanic rock that punched …

The European settlement of Otago began in March 1848, when the first two immigrant ships, the John Wickliffe and the Philip Laing, arrived from Greenock on the Firth of Clyde. The venture was an offshoot of the Free Chu…

In 1864 two Māori, Ihaia Tainui and Haimona Taukau, found gold near the Taramakau River, and within a year an estimated 1,800 prospectors had arrived. Hokitika grew so fast that in 1866 it was briefly the most populous …

In 1856 gold was found near Collingwood, and the rush that followed was the first in New Zealand's history. It was one chapter in a long story: tradition tells that the waka Uruao brought ancestors of the Waitaha people…

Nelson, known in Māori as Whakatū, was established in 1841 and became a city by British royal charter in 1858, making it the oldest city in the South Island and the second-oldest settled city in the country. Māori settl…

Marlborough is known above all for three things: its dry climate, the drowned valleys of the Marlborough Sounds and the Sauvignon blanc that carries the district's name around the world. Sitting at the north-eastern cor…

Southland is known to Māori as Murihiku, the last joint of the tail. Its earliest inhabitants were Waitaha, who came on the Uruao waka whose captain Rākaihautū named places and carved out lakes across the region, follow…

On 23 November 1791 two ships of the Vancouver Expedition, HMS Discovery under Captain George Vancouver and HMS Chatham under Lieutenant William Broughton, independently sighted this small group of islands. Vancouver ca…

The first people of the Chatham Islands were the Moriori, descended from the East Polynesians who also settled mainland New Zealand. A group migrated here probably in the fifteenth century, and genealogy and artefacts s…