Rotorua travel guide

Top 9 sights in Rotorua

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1

   Mount Tarawera

   A volcano southeast of Rotorua that tore itself open along seventeen kilometres on the night of 10 June 1886, killing more than a hundred people and burying the villages beneath it. The rift is still visible from the air.

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2. 

   2

   Lake Rotorua / Te Rotorua nui ā Kahumatamomoe

   A caldera lake of eighty square kilometres, the second largest in the North Island and only eleven metres deep on average. Sulphur springs colour its southern shore and the smell is part of the town.

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3. 

   3

   Frying Pan Lake

   The largest hot spring in the world, in the Echo Crater of the Waimangu valley, formed by the Tarawera eruption of 1886 and a later explosion in 1917. Its acidic water covers nearly four hectares and holds between fifty and sixty degrees.

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4. 

   4

   Champagne Pool

   A hot spring in the Waiotapu field, sixty-five metres across and about as deep, formed some seven hundred years ago. Carbon dioxide bubbles up through water at seventy-four degrees, and the orange rim is arsenic and antimony precipitating out.

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5. 

   5

   Lake Tarawera

   The largest of the lakes around Mount Tarawera. When the mountain split open in June 1886 it killed something like a hundred and twenty people and buried the village of Te Wairoa; a phantom canoe was reported on this water days before, which the survivors all remembered.

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6. 

   6

   Tarawera Falls

   A waterfall of sixty-five metres where the Tarawera river, having vanished into caves in a fourteen-thousand-year-old lava flow, bursts straight out of the middle of a cliff face.

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7. 7

   Rotorua International Stadium

   A rugby ground in the Westbrook suburb of Rotorua, one of the home venues of Bay of Plenty and used for provincial and touring matches.

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8. 

   8

   Lake Rotoiti / Te Roto kite ā Ihenga i ariki ai Kahu

   A lake in the Okataina caldera, joined to Lake Rotorua by the Ohau channel and the northwesternmost of the chain. Hot springs come up along parts of its shore that can be reached only by boat, which is what the kayak trips go for.

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9. 

   9

   Lake Rotomahana

   A lake southwest of Mount Tarawera which the 1886 eruption enlarged many times over, drowning the Pink and White Terraces — the silica formations that had been the country's greatest tourist attraction.

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