Auckland
A city of 1.7 million built across two harbours and roughly 53 volcanoes.
Tāmaki Makaurau — Auckland — holds about a third of New Zealand's population and is the largest Polynesian city in the world. It is not the capital (that moved to Wellington in 1865), but it is the arrival point for most international visitors and a better base than its reputation suggests.
Built on a volcanic field
Auckland sits on roughly 53 separate volcanoes. Not one large volcano with many vents — 53 individually plumbed eruptions across the last 200,000 years, a formation geologists call a monogenetic field.
Rangitoto, the symmetrical island guarding the harbour entrance, is the youngest at around 600 years old and was witnessed erupting by Māori living on nearby Motutapu. Mount Eden (Maungawhau) and One Tree Hill (Maungakiekie) are older cones that were terraced into substantial fortified pā.
Two harbours, one isthmus
The Waitematā Harbour faces east into the Hauraki Gulf; the Manukau faces west into the Tasman Sea. The strip of land between them is barely two kilometres across at its narrowest, which is why Auckland has more boats per capita than any city on earth and why it is called the City of Sails.
The Sky Tower rises 328 metres above the CBD, the tallest freestanding structure in the southern hemisphere. You can walk a ledge around the outside at 192 metres or jump off it on a controlled wire.
Escape routes
Waiheke Island is a 35-minute ferry from downtown and has more than 30 vineyards, good beaches and a walking track around the headlands. It is the easiest genuinely worthwhile day trip in the country.
West of the city, Piha and Karekare are black-sand surf beaches backed by the Waitākere Ranges — dramatic, cold, and with rips that kill people every year. Swim between the flags.
Ninety minutes south, the Waitomo glowworm caves and the Hobbiton movie set are both comfortable day trips from Auckland.
Header photograph by Chiara Coetzee via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY / CC BY-SA.