Hawke’s Bay
Rebuilt in Two Years

On 3 February 1931, at 10.47 in the morning, an earthquake measuring around 7.8 destroyed Napier and Hastings in two and a half minutes. Two hundred and fifty-eight people died. The seabed rose by up to two metres, draining a lagoon and adding roughly forty square kilometres of new land to the town — land Napier Airport now sits on.

Napier was rebuilt over the following two years, at speed, in the architectural style of the moment. The result is one of the most concentrated collections of Art Deco architecture anywhere in the world, and the only city of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.

That is what most visitors come for. What keeps them longer is everything around it: New Zealand’s oldest wine region, the largest mainland gannet colony on earth, a cycle-trail network you can ride between cellar doors, and the country’s most reliable summer weather.

Napier and the Art Deco city

The rebuild happened in a narrow window, with materials rationed and reinforced concrete mandated after the earthquake. The style that resulted is Art Deco with a strong Spanish Mission influence and a distinctly local element: several buildings carry Maori motifs in their decorative panels, notably the ASB Bank on Hastings Street, which is unusual for the period and worth looking up at.

How to see it

• Guided walking tours from the Art Deco Trust on Tennyson Street, roughly an hour to ninety minutes, and by far the best way to understand what you are looking at. Around NZ$30–40.
• Self-guided with a map from the Trust shop, which costs a few dollars and works perfectly well.
• Vintage car tours in a 1930s vehicle, which is unashamedly touristic and entirely enjoyable.
• Key buildings — the Daily Telegraph Building, the National Tobacco Company Building in Ahuriri (the finest single facade in the city), the Municipal Theatre, the ASB Bank, and the Criterion Hotel.
• Marine Parade — Norfolk pines, the Pania of the Reef statue, the sunken gardens and the Soundshell, all part of the same rebuild.

The earthquake itself

Worth understanding, because it explains the landscape as well as the buildings. The MTG Hawke’s Bay museum on Marine Parade holds survivor accounts and film of the aftermath, and it is genuinely affecting. Fires broke out after the shaking and burned much of the retail centre; the naval vessel HMS Veronica happened to be in port and its crew provided the first organised response, which is why a street is named after it.

The uplift is visible if you know where to look. The Ahuriri Estuary is the remnant of the lagoon that drained; the flat land between the port and the airport did not exist before 1931.

Reading an Art Deco facade

The Art Deco tour is considerably better if you know what you are looking at, and the vocabulary is not complicated.

• Zigzags and chevrons — the signature Deco motif, borrowed from Aztec and Egyptian sources after the Tutankhamun discovery of 1922.
• Sunbursts and fountains — stylised rays above doorways and along parapets, representing the optimism of the machine age.
• Stepped parapets (ziggurats) — roof lines rising in tiers, echoing skyscraper setbacks.
• Speed lines — horizontal grooves running across a facade, suggesting motion. Stronger in the later Streamline Moderne buildings.
• Leadlight and etched glass — geometric panels above shopfronts, several of them original.
• Low relief and no cornices — decoration is pressed into the concrete rather than projecting from it, because heavy overhanging cornices had killed people in 1931. The safety lesson is built into the style.
• Spanish Mission — the parallel style here, with arched windows, tiled roofs and stucco. Hastings has more of it than Napier.

The Māori motif panels on the ASB Bank on Hastings Street are the most distinctive local element — kowhaiwhai patterns rendered in Deco geometry, which was highly unusual for a commercial building in 1932.

What to look at after dark

A number of Napier’s facades are floodlit at night and several retain original neon. The Municipal Theatre and the Daily Telegraph Building are the two worth walking back for; the light picks up the low relief in a way flat daylight does not.

The wine country

Hawke’s Bay is New Zealand’s oldest wine region — Marist missionaries planted vines at Mission Estate in 1851, and it is still operating, making it the country’s oldest winery. It is also the second largest region by production after Marlborough, and it makes fundamentally different wine.

Where Marlborough is sauvignon blanc, Hawke’s Bay is red — and specifically Bordeaux varieties and syrah. The reason is the Gimblett Gravels, a 800-hectare area of old riverbed exposed when the Ngaruroro River changed course in 1867. The stones hold heat, radiate it back at night, and ripen cabernet sauvignon, merlot and syrah reliably in a way almost nowhere else in New Zealand manages.

• Gimblett Gravels — the serious reds. Several of New Zealand’s most acclaimed wines come from this small area.
• Bridge Pa Triangle — adjacent, sandier soils, and increasingly interesting.
• Te Awanga — coastal, cooler, and where the chardonnay is.
• Mission Estate — the 1851 original, with a hillside setting and a large summer concert each year.
• Church Road — a wine museum in underground cellars alongside the tasting room.

Cellar-door tastings typically run NZ$10–25, frequently waived on purchase. Many of the best have restaurants attached, and long lunch at a Hawke’s Bay winery is one of the more civilised things available in New Zealand.

Riding between them

The Hawke’s Bay Trails are around 200 kilometres of mostly flat, sealed cycleway connecting Napier, Hastings, the coast and the wine country. It is one of the New Zealand Cycle Trails and it is genuinely easy riding — there is essentially no climbing.

Bike hire runs roughly NZ$45–70 a day, with e-bikes a little more, and several operators run guided wine-trail rides with a support vehicle so nobody has to be the designated rider. This is the single best way to do the region.

Which cellar doors, and how to plan a day

There are around seventy wineries in Hawke’s Bay and roughly thirty with cellar doors open to the public. Trying to see too many is the standard mistake — four in a day is plenty and three is better.

How to structure it

• Start in the Gimblett Gravels mid-morning, when your palate is fresh and the reds deserve it.
• Lunch at a winery restaurant — several of the region’s best restaurants are attached to cellar doors, and booking is essential in summer.
• Afternoon in Te Awanga or Bridge Pa, where the chardonnay and the lighter styles sit better after lunch.
• Finish at Te Mata Peak for the view across the plain, which is free and about fifteen minutes from Havelock North.

Getting between them without driving

• Guided wine tours — half day or full day, typically NZ$120–200 including tastings, with pick-up from Napier or Havelock North.
• Guided cycle tours — the same idea on the flat trail network, with a support van carrying purchases.
• Self-guided cycle hire — hire in Napier or Hastings and ride the marked wine trail. Entirely flat.
• Taxi or rideshare — workable between Havelock North and the nearer wineries, less so out to Te Awanga.

Hastings, Havelock North and Ahuriri

Napier gets the attention, but the region has four distinct centres and they are worth separating.

• Napier — the Art Deco centre, Marine Parade, MTG and the aquarium. Where most visitors stay.
• Ahuriri — Napier’s old port, ten minutes north, with the National Tobacco Company Building and the best concentration of restaurants in the region. Increasingly where locals eat.
• Hastings — twenty minutes inland, larger, with its own Art Deco and Spanish Mission buildings from the same rebuild and considerably fewer visitors looking at them. The Sunday farmers’ market is here.
• Havelock North — a village at the foot of Te Mata Peak, well-heeled, with good eating and the shortest drive to the wineries. The best base if wine is the priority.

Before the earthquake

Hawke’s Bay is Te Matau-a-Māui — the fish hook of Māui — and the name is geographic. In the tradition, Māui hauled up the North Island as a great fish, and the curve of the coast from Mahia down to Cape Kidnappers is the hook itself. The whole North Island is Te Ika-a-Māui, the fish of Māui, which is why Wellington at the southern tip is its head and Northland its tail.

Cook named Cape Kidnappers in 1769 after local Māori attempted to take a Tahitian boy from the Endeavour. The Māori name, Te Kauwae-a-Māui, means the fish hook of Māui — the same story, from the other side.

Ngāti Kahungunu is the iwi of the region and the third largest in New Zealand, with territory running from Wairoa down into the Wairarapa. The region’s early European history is pastoral — sheep stations from the 1850s — and several of the grand homesteads from that period survive, some open to visitors.

Cape Kidnappers and the gannets

Te Kauwae-a-Māui — Cape Kidnappers — holds the largest and most accessible mainland gannet colony in the world. Around twenty thousand birds nest on the cliff tops in a dense, noisy, extremely pungent mass, and you can stand a few metres from them.

• Season — birds arrive from July, chicks hatch from November, and the colony is at its fullest between November and February. Most birds have left by late April.
• Getting there — a tractor-trailer tour along the beach from Clifton, a 4WD overland tour, or an 8 km walk along the beach each way that must be timed with the tide and is genuinely dangerous if you get it wrong.
• Cost — tours typically NZ$70–130 depending on operator.
• The walk — only attempt it with current tide times from the visitor centre. People have been cut off by the tide beneath the cliffs.

Cape Sanctuary, the private conservation project on the peninsula, has reintroduced kiwi, takahē and tuatara behind a predator-proof fence, and some tours include it.

Food, orchards and Te Mata

Hawke’s Bay grows a very large share of what New Zealand eats — apples, pears, stone fruit, squash and berries — and the region takes its food seriously.

• Hawke’s Bay Farmers’ Market — Sunday mornings at the Hastings Showgrounds, and one of the best in the country.
• Napier Urban Farmers’ Market — Saturday mornings, smaller and more central.
• Orchard gates and fruit stalls along the Hastings roads through summer, selling at prices that seem like an error.
• Te Mata Peak — 399 metres, drivable to the summit, with a view across the whole plain to Ruapehu on a clear day. Free. Walking tracks on the flanks and paragliding off the top.
• Ahuriri — Napier’s port precinct, with the best restaurants in the city and the National Tobacco Building.
• Havelock North — the village at the foot of Te Mata, with good eating and the closest access to the wineries.

Walking, beaches and the outdoors

The wine and the architecture crowd out the fact that Hawke’s Bay has genuinely good walking and the most dependable beach weather in the North Island.

• Te Mata Park — around 30 kilometres of tracks across the peak and down through the redwoods and the Tukituki cliffs. The Peak Trail Loop takes about two hours and the views are the best in the region. Free.
• Ocean Beach — the region’s best surf beach, half an hour from Havelock North, patrolled in summer.
• Waimarama — long, safe swimming when calm, with Bare Island offshore.
• Napier’s Marine Parade — a pebble beach, not a swimming one; strong undertow and steep shelving mean it is for walking, not paddling.
• White Pine Bush and Bell Rock — short bush walks in the Maungaharuru range north-west of Napier.
• Boundary Stream Mainland Island — a DOC restoration project with kokako and kiwi, and excellent easy walking tracks.
• The Tukituki River — swimming holes and easy riverside cycling under the Te Mata cliffs.

Beyond the plain

• Te Urewera — two hours north-west, the largest untouched native forest in the North Island, and since 2014 a legal entity in its own right rather than a national park — the first landscape in the world granted legal personhood. Lake Waikaremoana and its Great Walk sit within it. Visit with respect; Tūhoe are the kaitiaki and access arrangements differ from a standard park.
• Central Hawke’s Bay — Waipawa and Waipukurau, plus the hill with the longest place name in the world, which people do stop to photograph.
• Ocean Beach and Waimarama — the region’s best surf beaches, half an hour from Havelock North.
• Mahia Peninsula — two and a half hours north, with excellent surf and Rocket Lab’s launch complex on the headland.
• The Tukituki Valley — a lovely drive under the Te Mata cliffs, with vineyards and river swimming holes.

What Hawke’s Bay costs

Hawke’s Bay is meaningfully cheaper than Queenstown or Auckland for accommodation and eating, and a great deal of the region — Te Mata, the beaches, the Marine Parade, the cycle trails once you have a bike — costs nothing. See our New Zealand travel costs guide for the wider picture.

Where to stay

• Napier Marine Parade and the CBD — walkable to the Art Deco centre, MTG, the aquarium and the restaurants. The obvious first-visit choice.
• Ahuriri — the port precinct, quieter, with the best eating and a short drive or cycle into town.
• Havelock North — the best base if the wine country is the point, and the nicest village in the region.
• Te Awanga and Clifton — coastal, close to Cape Kidnappers, with vineyards on the doorstep and very little else.
• Hastings — cheapest, central to everything, and less charming than the alternatives.
• Winery accommodation — several estates have lodges or cottages, which removes the driving problem entirely.

Book far ahead for the February Art Deco Festival weekend and for vintage in March. Outside those windows the region has good availability and reasonable rates year-round.

Two-day and three-day plans

Two days

• Day 1 — morning Art Deco walking tour in Napier, lunch on Marine Parade, afternoon at MTG for the earthquake story, then up Te Mata Peak for sunset and dinner in Havelock North or Ahuriri.
• Day 2 — morning gannet tour at Cape Kidnappers (tide-dependent), then three or four cellar doors in the Gimblett Gravels with a winery lunch.

Three days

Add a full day on the Hawke’s Bay Trails — hire bikes in Napier, ride the coastal section to Clifton or the wine loop through Bridge Pa, and let a support van carry anything you buy. If it is a Sunday, start at the Hastings farmers’ market instead.

If you have a week

Add Te Urewera and Lake Waikaremoana, two hours north-west, or drive south through Central Hawke’s Bay and the Wairarapa toward Wellington, which is a far better route than the inland highway and takes in Martinborough’s pinot noir on the way.

The Wairarapa detour

If you are driving south toward Wellington, the inland route through Central Hawke’s Bay and the Wairarapa is slower than State Highway 2 by about an hour and considerably better.

• Martinborough — a village of about 1,500 people surrounded by roughly twenty cellar doors, almost all within cycling distance of the square. This is New Zealand’s most concentrated pinot noir district and bike hire from the square is the standard way to do it.
• Greytown — the best-preserved Victorian wooden main street in the country, and very good eating.
• Cape Palliser — the North Island’s southernmost point, with a red-and-white lighthouse up 250 steps and the largest fur seal colony on the North Island at its base.
• Putangirua Pinnacles — eroded earth pillars in a dry riverbed, a two-hour return walk, and instantly recognisable to anyone who has seen the Paths of the Dead sequence.
• Castlepoint — a lighthouse on a reef with a lagoon behind it, on the wild east coast.

Adding two nights in the Wairarapa turns the Hawke’s Bay to Wellington leg from a transit day into one of the better stretches of a North Island trip.

When to go

Hawke’s Bay has among the most reliable weather in New Zealand — sheltered from the west by ranges, it records well over two thousand sunshine hours a year and noticeably less rain than most of the North Island.

Getting there and how long

Napier Airport has direct flights from Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, which makes a fly-in fly-out wine weekend genuinely practical.

• Two nights — the Art Deco tour, a day in the wine country, and the gannets. Tight but workable.
• Three nights — add a full day on the cycle trails and Te Mata Peak.
• Four or more — Te Urewera, the surf beaches, or a slower pace around the cellar doors.

Hawke’s Bay sits well on a route between Tongariro or Taupo and Wellington, and it is the part of the North Island most often left out of a two-week loop. See our North Island travel guide.

Accessibility and families

• The Art Deco walking tour is flat and on sealed footpaths throughout.
• The Hawke’s Bay Trails are sealed and essentially level, and suit hand-cycles, adapted bikes and families with young children.
• Te Mata Peak is drivable to the summit lookout.
• Cape Kidnappers tractor tours have limited accessibility; contact the operator ahead. The beach walk is not accessible.
• MTG Hawke’s Bay is fully accessible.
• For children: the National Aquarium on Marine Parade, the Marine Parade playgrounds, Splash Planet in Hastings, and the gannet tractor ride all land well. The wine country is less compelling, though several cellar doors have lawns and playgrounds designed for exactly this problem.