Wellington travel guide

Top 10 sights in Wellington

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Phillip Capper · CC BY 2.0

   Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

   New Zealand's national museum, opened on the Wellington waterfront in 1998 and free to enter. It holds a colossal squid, a Gallipoli exhibition with figures at two and a half times life size, and a marae inside the building.

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   2

   Sacred Heart Cathedral

   The Catholic cathedral of Wellington, on Hill Street directly beside parliament. The parish it serves was founded in 1850, a decade after the settlement itself.

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   3

   Wellington Zoo

   New Zealand's oldest zoo, opened in 1906 on a hilly thirteen-hectare site in the green belt. It became a charitable trust in 2003 and runs a hospital that treats native wildlife brought in from across the region.

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4. 

   4© Tony Wills · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Zealandia

   The first fully fenced urban ecosanctuary in the world, 225 hectares of regenerating forest in an old water catchment behind Karori. A pest-proof fence completed in 1999 keeps out rats, stoats and possums, and birds long gone from the mainland — kaka, takahe, tuatara — now breed inside it.

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5. 

   5© Phillip Capper from Wellington, New Zealand · CC BY 2.0

   Wahine

   A roll-on roll-off ferry built in Glasgow and put on the Wellington to Lyttelton run in 1966. On 10 April 1968 the storm from cyclone Giselle drove her onto Barrett Reef at the harbour mouth, where she capsized; 51 of the 734 people aboard died.

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6. 

   6© Lanma726 at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   St Mary of the Angels

   A Catholic church completed in 1922 and said to be the first Gothic Revival church in the southern hemisphere built in reinforced concrete — a rational choice in a city that expects earthquakes. Frederick de Jersey Clere designed it and the interior is unusually light.

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   7

   Wellington Botanic Garden

   Twenty-five hectares of hillside garden reached by the cable car from Lambton Quay, mixing a rose garden, formal beds and a remnant of the native forest that once covered the harbour slopes.

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   8

   Futuna Chapel

   John Scott's chapel of 1961, built by the Marist brothers and named for the Pacific island where Peter Chanel was martyred in 1841. It fuses the form of a Maori whare with modernist concrete, and took the New Zealand Institute of Architects gold medal in 1968.

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9. 

   9© Musuems Wellington · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Wellington Museum

   A museum in an 1892 bond store on Queens Wharf, covering the city's life on the water. Its account of the Wahine, the ferry that sank in the harbour mouth in a 1968 storm with fifty-one lives lost, is the part people remember.

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10. 

    10© Dean S. Pemberton · CC BY-SA 2.5

    Old St Paul's

    A church of 1866 built entirely from native timber — rimu, matai and kauri — in the Gothic Revival manner, so that the columns and vaults are of wood rather than stone. It served as the pro-cathedral until 1964.

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1. 

   1© New Zealand Defence Force from Wellington, New Zealand · CC BY 2.0

   National War Memorial

   The national war memorial, whose carillon of 1932 has seventy-four bells and is among the largest in the world. Below it the Hall of Memories holds the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, brought back from the Somme in 2004.

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2. 

   2© Phillip Capper from Wellington, New Zealand · CC BY 2.0

   HMNZS Wellington

   A Royal New Zealand Navy frigate scuttled off Wellington. Decommissioned and sunk as an artificial reef in 2005, she now lies upright in twenty-five metres of water in Island Bay and serves as a dive site.

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3. 

   3© Gouldy99 · CC BY 2.0

   St Gerard's Church and Monastery

   A red brick church and monastery on the hillside above Oriental Bay, built by the Redemptorists between 1908 and 1932. They stand out on the skyline from almost everywhere in the harbour.

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4. 

   4© Soupisgoodfood at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 2.5

   Te Ngākau Civic Square

   The civic square of Wellington, surrounded by the town hall, the library and the art gallery. A globe of silver ferns hangs in the air above it, and a bridge of carved timber leads over the road to the waterfront.

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5. 

   5© Jaydenm · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Wrights Hill Fortress

   A counter-bombardment battery dug into a hill above Wellington during the Second World War, with two hundred metres of tunnels and emplacements for guns that arrived too late to be used. Volunteers open it on set days.

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   Karori Cemetery

   A cemetery opened at Karori in 1891 and the second largest in New Zealand, holding governors, prime ministers and a war graves section. It is also, by default, a bush reserve full of birds.

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7. 

   7© alana's · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Massey Memorial

   The tomb of William Massey, prime minister through the First World War, built on a headland at the harbour entrance after his death in 1925. Ships pass directly below it.

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8. 

   8© Nick-D · CC BY-SA 3.0

   New Zealand Tomb of the Unknown Warrior

   The tomb of the unknown warrior in front of the National War Memorial in Wellington. The remains were brought from a New Zealand military cemetery in France in 2004 and interred here, in a granite tomb inlaid with bronze.

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9. 

   9© Lanma726 at English Wikipedia · CC BY 3.0

   Katherine Mansfield Birthplace

   The wooden house where Katherine Mansfield was born in 1888 and spent her first years, restored to how it looked then. Her stories return to this street and this garden repeatedly.

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10. 

    10© Tony Wills · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Fort Ballance

    A coastal battery of the 1880s on the Miramar peninsula, built when the colony feared a Russian raid. Its emplacements and tunnels survive above the harbour entrance.

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