Napier is a city that rose from the ruins to become a gem unlike anywhere else in the world. In 1931, a devastating earthquake flattened the centre; over the next few years, the city was rebuilt all at once in the most modern style of the day, art deco, and was frozen in time. The result is one of the most complete and consistent collections of art deco architecture on the planet: entire streets of buildings with geometric lines, zigzag motifs, pastel colours and Māori details, turning Napier into a 1930s film set come to life.
But Napier is much more than its architecture. It looks out over the Pacific along the elegant Marine Parade waterfront, lined with Norfolk pines, gardens, fountains and the famous statue of Pania of the Reef. It sits at the heart of Hawke's Bay, one of New Zealand's great wine regions — with more than 30 wineries, including the oldest in the country — and of a sunny countryside of orchards and olive groves. And half an hour away, at Cape Kidnappers, nests the largest mainland gannet colony in the world, a natural spectacle not to be missed.
This guide explores Napier with a practical and curious eye: how to discover its art deco (on a guided tour or on your own), what to see along the waterfront, how to visit the vineyards by bike, how to reach the gannet colony and how to make the most of Hawke's Bay's sunshine and good wine. Behind its retro beauty lies a dramatic history — the 1931 earthquake — and a deep Māori culture, that of Ngāti Kahungunu, in the land legend calls the fish hook of Māui.
Napier (Ahuriri) lies in the territory of the Ngāti Kahungunu iwi, which established itself as the dominant people of Hawke's Bay around the 16th century; the region is Te Matau-a-Māui, 'the fish hook of Māui', after the legend of the demigod who fished up the North Island. Navigator James Cook sailed past the coast in 1769 and named Cape Kidnappers after an incident with local Māori. European settlement in the 19th century turned Napier into a wool and fruit port. On 3 February 1931, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake — the country's worst natural disaster — destroyed the centre of Napier and neighbouring Hastings, killed 256 people and lifted the coastal land by several metres. The city was rebuilt within a few years in art deco style, which made it famous. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The eastern coast where Cook first landed in 1769, ancestral land of Ngāti Kahungunu, the country's third-largest iwi. A wine and fruit-growing region, famous for Napier, the art deco city rebuilt after the devastating 1931 earthquake, and for Gisborne, the first city in the world to see the sun.
Read the history of Hawke's Bay and the East Coast →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before it was an art deco city, this place had a name and people it belonged to. For Māori, the whole Hawke's Bay region is Te Matau-a-Māui, 'the fish hook of Māui'. Tradition says that the demigod Māui, fishing from his canoe, hauled up from the seabed a great fish that became New Zealand's North Island (Te Ika-a-Māui, 'the fish of Māui'), and that the curve of Hawke's Bay is the shape of the magic hook he caught it with. Napier, whose Māori name is Ahuriri, sits on this land steeped in myth.
The main people of the region are the Ngāti Kahungunu iwi, one of the largest in the country, which became the dominant power on the east coast around the 16th century. Their whakapapa (genealogy) goes back to the great Tākitimu canoe, one of the waka of the Polynesian migration, and to a line of illustrious ancestors: Rongokako, famous for his giant leaps; his son Tamatea; and his grandson Kahungunu, after whom the iwi is named. Kahungunu was a chief known for his charisma, his leadership and his many marriage alliances, which wove a web of kinship right along the east coast. From him descend the people who still hold mana over these lands today.
Before Europeans arrived, the Ahuriri area was a rich landscape of lagoon, wetlands, sea and plains. The great Ahuriri Lagoon was a natural pantry, a vital mahinga kai (food-gathering place), full of fish, shellfish and birds, and local hapū (sub-tribes), such as those of Te Whanganui-a-Orotū, lived off its resources. Recognising that Napier is Ahuriri, Ngāti Kahungunu land on the hook of Māui, is the starting point for understanding everything that came after.
The first European to sight this coast was the British navigator James Cook, who sailed New Zealand waters in 1769 aboard the Endeavour. As he passed the headland that still bears his mark, the incident that gave it its name took place: according to the English, some Māori trading from their canoes tried to carry off a young Tahitian crew member (Taiata). The boy managed to escape and get back to the ship, and Cook named the place Cape Kidnappers. It was one of the many violent misunderstandings of the first contact between Europeans and Māori.
European settlement of Hawke's Bay began in earnest in the mid-19th century. Missionaries, whalers, traders and settlers moved into the area, and in 1851 the Crown bought land from Māori on terms that, as in so many parts of the country, worked against the iwi. Napier was founded as a port and named after Sir Charles Napier, a British general. Laid out on and around a hill surrounded by the Ahuriri Lagoon, the town grew as an export port for wool, meat and, later, fruit and wine from the fertile Hawke's Bay plains.
By the early 20th century, Napier was a thriving Victorian and Edwardian town of brick and stone buildings, with its port life, its trade and its colonial society. Meanwhile, Ngāti Kahungunu and its hapū were steadily losing land and control over their traditional resources, including much of the Ahuriri Lagoon, in the long process of dispossession that came with colonisation. Nothing suggested that, in a matter of seconds, that whole brick town would come crashing down.
On the morning of Tuesday 3 February 1931, at 10:47, the ground in Hawke's Bay shook with unheard-of violence. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake, centred about 15 km north of Napier, rocked the region for two and a half endless minutes. It was, and still is, the worst natural disaster in New Zealand's history. The brick and masonry buildings of Napier and neighbouring Hastings, never built for such force, collapsed en masse onto streets full of people.
The worst came next: the fires. With water mains broken and firefighters overwhelmed, the flames spread through central Napier and consumed whatever the quake had left standing. For days the town burned. The toll was devastating: 256 dead (161 in Napier, 93 in Hastings and others in the surrounding area), thousands injured and a town practically flattened. Survivors camped in parks and on the outskirts, looked after by sailors from a navy ship that happened, by sheer luck, to be in port and that coordinated the rescue.
The earthquake didn't just destroy things: it reshaped the geography itself. The uplift raised the coastline by about 2.7 metres and drained the vast Ahuriri Lagoon, bringing some 3,000 hectares of former seabed to the surface. Suddenly there was new land where there had been water, land on which suburbs, industry and Napier's own airport now stand. For Ngāti Kahungunu and the hapū of Te Whanganui-a-Orotū, this change was another blow: the lagoon that had been their ancestral pantry, their mahinga kai, dried up, changing their way of life forever, and much of the new land was claimed by the government without compensation. For Māori, then, the disaster also meant a cultural loss that official history often forgets.
Out of the ruins and ashes came something extraordinary. Instead of rebuilding piecemeal, Napier was remade almost entirely and all at once, in just two or three years (between 1931 and 1933), in the most modern architectural style of the day: art deco. The urgency to rebuild coincided with the worldwide peak of that geometric style, and a group of local architects, working against the clock, designed dozens of new buildings in the centre in a shared language.
The choices were practical too, and they left their mark on the city: buildings were kept low (just a few storeys) for earthquake safety, with reinforced concrete structures far sturdier than the fallen brick, and façades decorated with classic art deco motifs (zigzags, sunbursts, fountains, chevrons, straight lines), often painted in soft pastel shades. Some architects also worked in Māori decorative patterns (kōwhaiwhai), blending the modern and the local into an almost one-of-a-kind style. Touches of Spanish Mission and Stripped Classical were added to the mix.
The result, which at the time was simply 'the rebuilt town', turned out over the decades to be a treasure: one of the most complete, consistent and well-preserved collections of art deco architecture in the world, rivalled only by Miami Beach. From the 1980s, as the world began to value this heritage, Napier embraced its art deco identity: the Art Deco Trust was set up to protect it, façades were restored and the February Art Deco Festival was born, filling the streets with vintage cars, 1930s fashion and swing music. What began as a tragedy ended up giving Napier its soul and its fame.
Today Napier is one of New Zealand's most charming cities, proudly living its double identity: the art deco gem that rose from disaster and the hub of one of the country's great wine- and fruit-growing regions. Its retro streets, its waterfront lined with Norfolk pines, its sunny vineyards and the gannet colony at Cape Kidnappers make it a destination for culture, food and nature alike, in the sunniest corner of the North Island. The February Art Deco Festival draws visitors from all over the world.
The memory of the 1931 earthquake is still alive and present. The city honours it in museums, memorials and stories: every building in the centre is, in a way, a reminder of that morning and of a community's incredible ability to rise again. At the same time, New Zealand has been acknowledging the historical injustices done to Ngāti Kahungunu: Treaty of Waitangi settlement processes have addressed grievances such as the loss of the Ahuriri Lagoon and ancestral lands, on a path of redress and recognition of the iwi's mana over these lands.
For travellers, knowing this history gives Napier's beauty real depth. The art deco lines stop being merely pretty and start telling a story of tragedy and heroic rebuilding; the flat land under the airport and some suburbs is a reminder that, until 1931, there was a lagoon there that fed a people; and the Māori name, Ahuriri, on the hook of Māui, keeps the connection with Ngāti Kahungunu alive. Napier is proof that even the worst disaster can give rise to something beautiful and unique, as long as we don't forget everything that was there before, and everyone who was.
