Wanaka is what many people are looking for when they travel to the South Island: the mind-blowing scenery of Queenstown, but without the frenzy. On the shores of a deep blue alpine lake, surrounded by the mountains of Mount Aspiring National Park, this relaxed town combines top-level adventure with a small-town calm that wins you over. People come here to hike, ski, paddle on the lake, taste wine and, above all, breathe.
Its symbol is humble and world-famous: a lone willow growing in the water at the edge of the lake, known as #ThatWanakaTree, probably the most photographed tree in New Zealand. A few minutes away is the Roys Peak hike, whose view of the lake from the top has become one of the country's most iconic postcards, and the quirky Puzzling World, a park of optical illusions and mazes that has been a local institution since 1973.
This guide covers the best of Wanaka with concrete, verified information: which hikes are worth it and how demanding they are, how much Puzzling World costs, where the famous tree is, how to get there from Queenstown over the country's highest mountain pass, where to ski in winter and how to get around without an urban bus. So you can find out why so many people, after visiting both, end up preferring Wanaka.
Wanaka is Wānaka to the Ngāi Tahu people, who visited this lake seasonally to hunt and fish and, above all, passed through on their way to the West Coast in search of pounamu (greenstone); the Clutha River / Mata-au was one of their trade routes. The seasonal camps were abandoned after an attack by a war party from the north in 1836. European settlers arrived in the 1850s with the large sheep stations, and the town, which grew up alongside the Cardrona gold rush (1862), was first called Pembroke before regaining its Māori name in 1940. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The “Edinburgh of the South”: settled by Scottish Presbyterians of the Free Church in 1848 around Dunedin, it became the country’s richest province with the 1861 gold rush. Land of Ngāi Tahu, of the alpine lakes of Queenstown and Wanaka, and of the adventure capital of the world.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The lake that now draws hikers and photographers from all over the world was, for centuries, a waypoint on one of the great trade networks of Māori New Zealand. For the Ngāi Tahu people, the iwi (tribe) that holds sway over the South Island, and for the tribes that came before them (Waitaha and Kāti Māmoe, later absorbed into Ngāi Tahu), this lake was Wānaka, and it was part of a world of seasonal trails linking the mountainous interior with the coast.
The Māori did not live by the lake all year round: winters in the interior are harsh. They came in summer, on organised expeditions, to hunt birds (including the giant moa, before it became extinct), to fish and to gather mahika kai (natural and cultural resources, from fish to plants). But the real driving force behind these journeys was pounamu, New Zealand jade, the most prized material in their entire culture, used to make tools, weapons and sacred ornaments such as the hei-tiki. Pounamu was found only on the West Coast (Te Tai Poutini), and Wānaka lay along the way: the rivers and valleys of the region, especially the great Clutha / Mata-au River, which flows out of the lake, were routes for carrying the jade back east and south.
That life of seasonal travel was cut short, abruptly and violently. In 1836, a war party from the north — part of the so-called Musket Wars, which ravaged all of New Zealand once some iwi got hold of European firearms — reached the area and attacked the camps. After the raid, Ngāi Tahu abandoned their seasonal settlements at Lake Wānaka, and when the first Europeans arrived a few years later, they found a landscape that seemed empty, without realising they were walking on land that had been inhabited and travelled for centuries.
The first European to see this region was Nathanael Chalmers, guided inland in 1853 by the chiefs Reko and Kaikōura — the same Chalmers who was also the first to set eyes on Lake Wakatipu. Behind the explorers came, as everywhere in the South Island interior, the runholders: settlers who took up vast land leases to raise sheep. From the 1850s, the upper Clutha valley gradually filled with large high country stations, and the landscape of grassland and mountains began to fill with flocks.
As in so many places in Otago, what sped everything up was gold. In 1862 gold was discovered in the nearby Cardrona Valley, and many miners came to try their luck, giving rise to small settlements in the area. The present site of Wanaka was surveyed in 1863, and a town soon sprang up to supply miners and runholders. Curiously, barely founded under the name Wanaka, the settlement was renamed Pembroke a month later, in honour of the youngest son of the Earl of Pembroke, a British nobleman with no connection whatsoever to the place.
For decades the town was called Pembroke and grew slowly as a rural and service centre, in the shadow of the gold rush's decline. Only in 1940 did it officially get back its original Māori name, Wanaka, returning to the place the name given to it by its first inhabitants. It was a small change on paper, but a meaningful one: an acknowledgement that the history of this lake did not begin with the British settlers, but long before, with the pounamu travellers.
Behind Wanaka rises a world of mountains that shaped much of its later history: the massif that culminates in Tititea / Mount Aspiring (3.033 m), the 'Matterhorn of the South', one of the most elegant and sought-after peaks in the country. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while the town dozed as a rural centre, these mountains began to attract explorers, high-country shepherds and the first mountaineers, who opened up routes through almost unexplored glacial valleys. Little by little, the region earned a reputation as serious adventure territory, long before mass tourism arrived.
That natural wealth was formally protected in 1964, when Mount Aspiring / Tititea National Park was created: a vast expanse of more than 3.500 km² of mountains, glaciers, valleys and native forest that wraps around Wanaka to the north and west. With the park, the area established itself as one of the great gateways to the South Island's alpine world, with legendary walks such as the Routeburn (shared with Fiordland), the Rob Roy Glacier or the climb up Roys Peak, and with the Māori name Tititea ('glistening peak') reclaiming its place alongside the European one.
Recognition of the region's Māori history took a decisive step forward in 1998 with the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act, one of the major Treaty of Waitangi settlements. That agreement redressed, if only partially, centuries of dispossession: it formally acknowledged the grievances suffered by Ngāi Tahu across the South Island and included an apology from the Crown, financial compensation and — very importantly for places like Wanaka — the restoration of Māori place names and recognition of the iwi's ancestral bond with lakes, rivers and mountains. Lake Wānaka and its surroundings were no longer just a landscape 'discovered' by settlers, but once again part of the long memory of the pounamu travellers who crossed it on their way to the jade coast.
For almost the entire 20th century, Wanaka was exactly what its reputation promises today: a quiet town. While its neighbour Queenstown, an hour away over the mountains, set about building an adrenaline-fuelled tourism empire, Wanaka remained above all a summer holiday spot for New Zealand families. Kiwis came with their boats and tents to spend the summer holidays by the lake, in a relaxed world of baches (the New Zealand holiday home), fishing and swims in the cold water. It was a local secret, with no airport and no big hotels.
Two things changed Wanaka's fortunes in recent decades. The first was skiing: the development of the Treble Cone (the largest in the South Island) and Cardrona ski areas turned the region into one of the best winter sports bases in the country, drawing skiers and snowboarders from Australia and around the world and bringing the town to life in the cold season. The second was, quite simply, the beauty of the place and social media: the humble willow in the lake, #ThatWanakaTree, and the view from Roys Peak became viral images that went around the globe and put Wanaka on the map for millions of travellers.
Today Wanaka faces a tension familiar to many beautiful towns: how to grow without losing its soul. Tourism and the arrival of New Zealanders in search of a better quality of life have sent the population and house prices soaring, and in high season the town fills up. But Wanaka still defends, with a certain pride, its identity as the calm alternative to Queenstown: the place you come to walk in the mountains of Mount Aspiring National Park, to ski, to have an unhurried coffee by the lake. Deep down, it is still what it always was: an essential stop on the way to beauty, just as when the pounamu travellers crossed its shores on their way to the jade coast.
