Day 1 - Rotorua

General

Rotorua is a city in the Bay of Plenty Region of New Zealand’s North Island, spread along the southern shore of Lake Rotorua, from which it takes its name. The centre sits about 280 metres above sea level on the volcanic plateau of the central North Island, and the built up area of roughly 46 square kilometres forms the seat of the Rotorua Lakes District, which also takes in the surrounding lake country. With an estimated resident population of 58,500, Rotorua ranks as the country’s 13th largest urban area and the Bay of Plenty’s second, behind the coastal city of Tauranga.

The full Māori name of lake and city, Te Rotorua-nui-a-Kahumatamomoe, means the second great lake of Kahumatamomoe, after the uncle to whom the ancestral explorer Ihenga dedicated the lake on discovering it; roto means lake and rua means two or second. The town built beside that lake is famous above all for what lies beneath it. Rotorua stands within the Rotorua Caldera, one of the great craters of the Taupō Volcanic Zone, and its hot springs, geysers, fumaroles and mud pools have made it a spa town and tourist resort since the 19th century. The hydrogen sulphide in the air earned the town the nickname Sulphur City.

The district around the city is one of lakes, thermal valleys and forested ridges. It contains 17 lakes, most of volcanic origin, and Lake Rotorua itself, the second largest lake of the North Island by surface area, lies immediately north of the centre with the island of Mokoia in its midst and geothermal steam rising at points along the shore. The climate is mild and temperate, sheltered from coastal winds, although winter nights bring frequent frosts and snow is rare.

Rotorua is the principal centre of the Te Arawa confederation of iwi, and no other New Zealand city has a larger share of Māori residents: in the 2023 census 46 per cent of the urban population identified as Māori and 57.1 per cent as European, with many people claiming more than one ethnicity. The district economy draws on tourism, geothermal energy, agriculture and forestry, with accommodation and food services employing a far larger share of the workforce than the national average. Rotorua has been governed since 2022 by Tania Tapsell, the first woman of Māori descent to hold the mayoralty, and hosts the Crankworx mountain bike festival each year.

History

The Rotorua lakes were settled by Māori of the Te Arawa confederation, whose ancestors arrived during the 14th century after the voyage of the Arawa canoe from the ancestral homeland of Hawaiki. A thriving pā grew up at Ohinemutu on the lake’s southern shore among the people who came to call themselves Ngāti Whakaue, and the fortified pā of Te Puia in the Whakarewarewa valley was held from about 1325. Tradition credits the region’s hot springs to Ngātoro-i-rangi, an ancestor priest who called on the gods to send fire bearing spirits from Hawaiki, which burst forth across the volcanic plateau. Ihenga, who gave the lake its name, is remembered as the explorer who opened the district to Te Arawa settlement.

In the early 19th century the lakes were drawn into the Musket Wars, as northern iwi armed with muskets raided southwards; a Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Maru expedition of 1818 set the pattern for later attacks. In 1822 Ngāti Whakaue ambushed and killed a Ngāpuhi force that had trespassed in Rotorua, an insult that demanded utu, or revenge. In February 1823 a Ngāpuhi led coalition under Hongi Hika and Pōmare I marched up the Pongakawa valley and attacked the Te Arawa stronghold on Mokoia Island, where the defenders lost about 170 warriors before the island fell.

Contact with Europeans increased from the 1820s: the trader Phillip Tapsell operated from Maketu from 1828 and later married into Te Arawa, while the missionaries Henry Williams and Thomas Chapman first visited the lakes in 1831. Chapman established a mission at Te Koutu in 1835 and, after it was abandoned, a second at Mokoia Island from 1838. During the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s the lakeshore saw skirmishing, and many Te Arawa warriors fought on the side of the colonial government; the politician William Fox, inspired by Yellowstone, urged that the thermal district become a national park.

Modern Rotorua grew out of the spa movement. Māori owners and European settlers alike saw the commercial promise of the hot springs, and in 1880 Ngāti Whakaue, rather than selling their land, leased about 50 acres to the Crown under an arrangement negotiated with Judge Fenton, which allowed the government to grant 99 year leases on their behalf. The Thermal Springs District Act of 1881 then gave the Crown exclusive rights to purchase or lease land containing hot springs, lakes or rivers. A new township was laid out on the lakeshore beside the old village of Ohinemutu, while the reserve set aside for the government sanatorium later became the Government Gardens.

Tourism defined the town from its foundation. In the 1880s visitors, many from Australia, travelled by coach to the Pink and White Terraces on Lake Rotomahana, at the time New Zealand’s most famous attraction, and local guides such as Sophia Hinerangi led parties through the village of Te Wairoa. The eruption of Mount Tarawera on 10 June 1886 destroyed the terraces and buried Te Wairoa, but Rotorua survived and remained the base for the thermal tourism that guidebooks called the Land of Boiling Water. The opening of the Rotorua Branch railway, with the Rotorua Express service from Auckland, brought rapid growth from 1894. The grand Tudor style Bath House rose in the Government Gardens between 1906 and 1908 as the centrepiece of a national spa, and the Blue Baths followed in 1933. Rotorua became a borough in 1922 and was declared a city in 1962.

Rotorua has also been a centre of Treaty of Waitangi settlement. Claims with Ngāti Whakaue were settled in 1993 over the broken promises of the 1880 leasing arrangements, the wider Te Arawa lakes settlement followed in December 2004, and in 2006 a settlement covering the historical claims of the Te Arawa iwi and hapū brought an apology, $36 million in compensation, up to 500 square kilometres of Crown forest land and 19 sites of special significance, among them the Whakarewarewa Thermal Springs Reserve. In 2015 the iwi gained a formal voice in local government through the Te Tatau o Te Arawa partnership board of the Rotorua Lakes Council.

Geology

Rotorua lies in the heart of the Taupō Volcanic Zone, the belt of active volcanism that runs for about 350 kilometres from Mount Ruapehu in the south-west to White Island in the north-east, where the Pacific plate dives beneath the Australian plate. The zone sits above a widening rift, and the crust beneath it is exceptionally thin, in places little more than 16 kilometres, above a shallow body of magma. Rotorua is one of the principal caldera volcanoes of this highly productive region.

The city and its lake occupy the Rotorua Caldera, a large rhyolitic collapse crater formed about 240,000 years ago, when a colossal eruption ejected more than 340 cubic kilometres of pumice and ash as the Mamaku ignimbrite and, in a closely paired event, fed a second eruption at the Ohakuri Caldera 30 kilometres to the south. Ranked at 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, the eruption left deposits up to 145 metres thick across the surrounding country. As the magma chamber emptied, the ground collapsed into two overlapping oval depressions about 22 kilometres across, which later filled with water as Lake Rotorua. Rhyolite lava domes then rose through the shattered crust, building the hills of Ngongotahā, Pohaturoa and Hinemoa Point and, later, the island of Mokoia; the most recent magmatic eruption in the caldera occurred less than 25,000 years ago.

The Rotorua geothermal field is the visible surface of this young system. The Whakarewarewa valley at the southern edge of the city holds about 500 hot pools, most of them alkaline chloride springs, and at least 65 geyser vents, of which seven are active; the Pōhutu Geyser plays to heights of up to 30 metres. Because the field extends beneath a residential city, householders and businesses long drew on it through wells up to 200 metres deep, until heavy extraction in the 1970s and 1980s caused many springs and geysers to fail. A bore closure programme in 1987 and 1988 cemented shut 106 wells within 1.5 kilometres of Pōhutu and retired about 120 more under a royalty regime, and the geysers and springs have since recovered. Small hydrothermal eruptions still occur within the urban area, and the lake itself is rich in dissolved sulphur, which tints the water a yellowish green; the Utuhina stream is warmed by the same underground system.

East of the city the story continues at the Ōkataina Volcanic Centre and its best known mountain, Mount Tarawera, 24 kilometres from central Rotorua, a cluster of rhyolite lava domes built up over the past 20,000 years or so inside a much older caldera. The Kaharoa eruption of about 1314 created the present peaks of Ruawahia, Wahanga and Tarawera and spread ash across the eastern North Island in volumes several times greater than the eruption of 1886.

That later eruption was an explosive basaltic event, the only large eruption of its kind in the zone’s recorded history. Shortly after midnight on 10 June 1886 a fissure 17 kilometres long tore across the mountain and south-westwards through Lake Rotomahana, blasting a crater two kilometres wide and hurling about two cubic kilometres of ash and scoria. The eruption buried nearby villages under metres of mud and ash, overwhelmed the Pink and White Terraces, the great silica sinter staircases that were the largest formations of their kind, and expanded Lake Rotomahana several times over; whether parts of the terraces survive beneath the new lake is still debated. The south-western end of the rift became the Waimangu Volcanic Valley, where the world’s most powerful geyser played between 1900 and 1904.

Things to See

The heart of Rotorua is its lakefront and the Government Gardens, laid out on the ground of the old sanatorium reserve at the eastern edge of the town centre. The gardens are dominated by the Bath House, a half timbered Tudor Revival building raised between 1906 and 1908, which housed the Rotorua Museum of Art and History from 1969, though it has stood closed for earthquake strengthening in recent years. Beside it stands the Blue Baths, opened in 1933 and celebrated in its day for mixed sex bathing when most public pools were segregated; it too has closed over earthquake strength concerns. The gardens, with their lawns and views across the lake to Mokoia Island, are open to all, and the steaming ground of Sulphur Point on the shore below shows that the whole promenade is built on an active thermal field.

A short walk from the centre, Kuirau Park shows how closely town and thermal activity interlock. The park is Rotorua’s free geothermal reserve in the central city, a grassy open space threaded with paths and boardwalks that pass boiling mud pools, fumaroles, hot springs and small craters where the ground has collapsed, while steam drifts across the lawns.

On the lakeshore west of the centre, Ohinemutu preserves the original Rotorua as a living Māori village. Ngāti Whakaue still occupy the waterfront pā, where the meeting house Tamatekapua on Te Papaiouru Marae faces the lake and steam rises from the ground between the houses. The village church, St Faith’s Anglican Church, is the district’s best known bicultural building: the first church on the site was consecrated in 1885 and the present building opened in 1914, its interior richly decorated with Māori carvings, tukutuku panels and painted kōwhaiwhai patterns, and its east window showing Christ in a Māori cloak walking on the waters of Lake Rotorua. Because the ground is too hot for graves, the dead are buried above ground in white vaults in the cemetery beside the church.

The Whakarewarewa valley at the southern end of the city is Rotorua’s signature geothermal landscape and a great Māori cultural site. Its pools and geyser vents cluster on Geyser Flat, where Pōhutu plays to about 30 metres once an hour and the smaller Prince of Wales Feathers and Waikorohihi geysers erupt nearby on the same fissure. The valley is also home to the living Māori village of Whakarewarewa, whose people of Tūhourangi and Ngāti Wāhiao descent trace their occupation of the area back to the pā of Te Puia, first held around 1325, and who have guided visitors across the steaming ground for generations, showing how the hot pools are used for cooking, bathing and heating. Within the same valley, the Te Puia visitor centre extends over 70 hectares around the New Zealand Māori Arts and Crafts Institute, where national schools of wood carving, weaving and stone and bone carving train new artists, and the carved meeting house Te Aronui a Rua stands beside the geyser terraces.

Lake Rotorua itself deserves a place on any itinerary: it covers 79.8 square kilometres yet averages only 10 metres in depth, is the North Island’s second largest lake, and its mineral rich water has a distinctive yellowish green cast. The sternwheeler Lakeland Queen, launched in 1986 and New Zealand’s only paddle steamer of its kind, offers cruises from the lakefront, while the island of Mokoia, a rhyolite dome in mid lake, is the setting of the best known of all Māori love stories, in which Hinemoa swam across from the mainland guided by the flute of her lover Tutanekai. Its streams, notably the Ngongotahā, hold trout, and the outfall at the north-eastern corner drains through Lake Rotoiti and the Kaituna River to the coast.

Behind the city, the Whakarewarewa Forest covers the ridges south of the thermal valley and carries more than 150 kilometres of graded mountain bike trails, which helped earn Rotorua gold level ride centre status from the International Mountain Biking Association in 2015 and a round of the Crankworx World Tour each year since. Visitors who keep to the marked paths and stay behind the barriers in the thermal areas will find Rotorua a safe base for exploring this extraordinary volcanic district.

References

1. Stafford, Don (1967). Te Arawa: A History of the Arawa People. Wellington: A. H. and A. W. Reed.
2. Stafford, Don (1986). The Founding Years in Rotorua: A History of Events to 1900. Auckland: Ray Richards Publisher.
3. Keam, Ronald F. (1988). Tarawera: The Volcanic Eruption of 10 June 1886. Auckland: R. F. Keam.
4. Graham, Ian J. (ed.) (2008). A Continent on the Move: New Zealand Geoscience into the 21st Century. Wellington: Geological Society of New Zealand.
5. Te Hāhi o te Whakapono / St Faith’s Anglican Church Ohinemutu. Heritage New Zealand list entry. www.heritage.org.nz/list-details/9705/Listing
6. Blue Baths. Heritage New Zealand list entry. www.heritage.org.nz/list-details/5394/Listing
7. Rotorua geothermal field. GNS Science. www.gns.cri.nz/our-science/earth-oceans-and-planets/volcanoes/rotorua-geothermal-field/
8. Kuirau Park. RotoruaNZ. www.rotoruanz.nz/see-and-do/geothermal/kuirau-park/
9. Rotorua. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotorua
10. Rotorua Caldera. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotorua_Caldera
11. Lake Rotorua. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Rotorua
12. Taupō Volcanic Zone. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taupo_Volcanic_Zone
13. Whakarewarewa. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whakarewarewa
14. Ohinemutu. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohinemutu
15. Te Arawa. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Arawa
16. Mount Tarawera. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tarawera
17. 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1886_eruption_of_Mount_Tarawera