Nau mai haere mai ki te Ōtepoti, Dunedin
From quintessential heritage destinations like Olveston and Larnach Castle, to the buzzy Warehouse Precinct and street art walk, Ōtepoti Dunedin’s heritage marches to a different, intriguing drum.
Itinerary Details
Time: 3 days
Distance: 84 km
Start: Northern Cemetery
Finish: Glenfalloch
Day One
Start at the end of the line, with the Northern Cemetery and Larnach’s Tomb. Commissioned by the businessman and politician William Larnach as a memorial to his first wife Eliza, the mausoleum is a replica in miniature of Dunedin’s First Church.
The Dunedin Botanic Garden is New Zealand’s oldest botanical gardens, and a Garden of International Significance. Highlights include a 3000-plant rhododendron dell, geographic and native plant collections and a heated Edwardian glass house.
Head to the university via Castle Street, Dundas Street and surrounds - an historic hotbed of scarfie antics. It may surprise you to learn that many of the streets’ classic student digs have been heritage-listed.
Within 21 years of its founding, Dunedin had a university. The first phase of development at the University of Otago’s current site produced some of the country’s finest buildings, statements in stone that spoke of Dunedin’s wealth and ambition. Start with the Clocktower complex. Don’t neglect the medical school strip on Great King Street, home to the Faculty of Dentistry’s 1960s Modernist HQ with its recent Jasmax-designed addition.
Housed in a Category 1 building beside the campus, Otago Museum has an internationally significant natural science collection and world’s best collection of articulated moa skeletons, among other treasures.
Finish at Knox Church. Designed by RA Lawson, the bluestone Gothic pile is Dunedin’s largest church.
Day Two
In 2014, Dunedin was named a UNESCO City of Literature. Start the day in that spirit with a visit to Robbie Burns the poet, whose bronze statue presides over the Octagon. The upper Octagon streetscape is dominated by St Paul’s Cathedral and the Town Hall, with a façade reputedly inspired by Michelangelo’s Palazzo Senatorio in Rome.
Crowning Bell Hill is the ubiquitous Lawson’s masterpiece, First Church. Criticised by some contemporaries as a worldly extravagance, it is Dunedin’s bijou Gothic cathedral, topped by a 54-metre spire.
The church is part of a larger heritage precinct near Moray Place. Notable buildings include the decommissioned 1896 Dunedin Prison – a rare example of a Victorian purpose-built courtyard prison – and the city’s Neo-Gothic 1902 Law Courts.
The area’s highlight is the extraordinary Flemish Renaissance-style Dunedin Railway Station, a beautifully decorative ode to the age of steam, with a half-kilometre platform, a domed tower and a booking hall mosaic floor of 750,000 Minton tiles. On Saturday, the carpark is transformed by the Otago Farmers Market.
Spend some time at the excellent Toitū Otago Settlers Museum, which tells the social history of the people who shaped Dunedin. Opened in Edwardian times, it was redeveloped a decade ago.
Wander south through Queens Gardens to Vogel St, the main artery of the buzzy Warehouse Precinct and the heart of Dunedin’s terrific street art trail. Recharge your batteries at one of the many brunch spots in the area. Take a look at the former Otago Harbour Board building, then head up the hill to explore historic Princes Street.
Day Three
“He liked a bit of swank”. So said poet Charles Brasch of David Theomin, the wealthy merchant who built Olveston, a palatial 35-room ‘family home’ in Dunedin’s Green Belt. Gifted to the city by Theomin’s daughter Dorothy, Olveston opened as a historic house museum in 1967.
Theomin had nothing on William Larnach when it came to grand designs. On a ridge of the Otago Peninsula, that ill-starred entrepreneur built a castle of 43 rooms, finished with Italian marble and Marseilles cobbles. Larnach called it ‘The Camp’, but his vision was of a residence of a scale and sumptuousness never before seen in the colonies. Larnach’s Castle has been beautifully restored, and is set in a Garden of International Significance.
Along the top of the peninsula, on Highcliff Road, you’ll spy drystone walls – stock fences made using volcanic boulders cleared from the fields. Head on to the windswept Taiaroa Head Royal Albatross colony. When you’ve finished watching giant birds courting, nesting and gliding, explore Fort Taiaroa, a network of tunnels and concealed gun pits established in the 1880s.
Return via the Portobello Road, stretches of which were formed using hand placed stone seawalls. Together, they constitute part of New Zealand’s longest Category 1 structure. Stop for a stroll through Glenfalloch, a beautiful woodland garden and homestead.
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