49 Fun Facts About Auckland

Auckland lies on which of New Zealand's islands?

North Island. About one in three New Zealanders lives in the Auckland region, and at the 2023 census the urban area alone outnumbered the whole South Island.

What is the Māori-language name for Auckland?

Tāmaki Makaurau. It is often translated as 'Tāmaki desired by many' or 'Tāmaki of a hundred lovers', because so many tribes prized the isthmus for its fertile soil and waterways.

Auckland is popularly known by which nickname?

City of Sails. The city straddles an isthmus between two harbours, and it has hosted yachting's America's Cup three times, in 2000, 2003 and 2021.

Which city replaced Auckland as New Zealand's capital in 1865?

Wellington. Members of Parliament could not agree on a more central capital, so the choice was handed to three commissioners from Australia, who picked the harbour town on Cook Strait.

Auckland was named after which British statesman?

George Eden. As First Lord of the Admiralty the Earl of Auckland had headed the navy in which the city's founder served as a captain; by 1840 he was Governor-General of India.

West Auckland, the English village behind the city's name, won 'the first World Cup' in which sport?

Football. A village team made up mostly of coal miners won the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy in Turin in 1909, a tournament later dubbed the first World Cup, then went back in 1911 and beat Juventus 6-1 in the final.

Which Lieutenant-Governor, fresh from signing the Treaty of Waitangi, chose Auckland as capital?

William Hobson. He put the government there over protests from southern settlers, wanting it near the main Māori and British populations, and he died in office in 1842.

Which iwi, later known for occupying Bastion Point, offered land for the new capital?

Ngāti Whātua. Their chief Āpihai Te Kawau, wary of attack by musket-armed northern rivals, invited the governor to settle on the isthmus in 1840.

Which region held New Zealand's capital before Auckland?

Northland. The first capital, at Okiato in the Bay of Islands, served for barely a year, and the abandoned settlement burned down in 1842.

What did Māori once haul overland across Auckland's narrow isthmus at Ōtāhuhu?

Canoes. Waka were dragged over portages such as Te Tō Waka at Ōtāhuhu, where only about a kilometre of land separates the east coast from the west.

Auckland's southern harbour opens west onto which sea?

Tasman Sea. Shifting sandbars guard the entrance, and when HMS Orpheus struck them in 1863, 189 of the 259 aboard drowned in New Zealand's worst shipwreck.

Māori terraced many of Auckland's volcanic cones to build what?

Fortified villages. From about 1600 tribes ringed the cones with terraces and palisades to form pā, and the earthworks still show on many of the field's 50-odd volcanoes.

Which volcano produced the most recent eruption in Auckland's field, about 600 years ago?

Rangitoto. It is the only eruption in the field that people saw: those living on neighbouring Motutapu left footprints that the eruption preserved.

Auckland's 328-metre Sky Tower was built as the centrepiece of what kind of complex?

Casino. SkyCity's tower met early scepticism and mocking nicknames when it rose in 1997, yet it has come to define the city's skyline.

Auckland's 1959 bridge to the North Shore crosses which harbour?

Waitematā. Traffic so outran the forecasts that four more lanes were hung off the bridge's sides in 1969; prefabricated in Japan, they were nicknamed the 'Nippon clip-ons'.

Auckland has more people of which group than any other city?

Polynesians. Large-scale migration from the Cook Islands, Niue and other Pacific islands began in the 1950s, just as thousands of young Māori were leaving rural districts for the city's wages.

Agents of which country sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland's harbour in 1985?

France. The ship was about to lead a protest flotilla to the nuclear test site at Mururoa; the bombs killed photographer Fernando Pereira, and two captured agents exposed the plot.

At the 2023 census, the largest group of overseas-born Aucklanders came from which region?

Asia. About one Aucklander in five was born there, more than double the share born in the Pacific Islands, although the city is famed for its Pacific communities.

At the 2023 census, which Pacific language was most spoken in Auckland?

Samoan. About 75,000 people in the Auckland region spoke it, 4.5% of residents, which put it well ahead of te reo Māori at 2.6%.

Auckland's international airport is in which southern suburb?

Māngere. The airport opened in 1966 to replace the air force field at Whenuapai that had served as the city's airport, and much of its runway sits on land reclaimed from the harbour.

What nickname do Aucklanders give the Central Motorway Junction, where State Highways 1 and 16 meet?

Spaghetti Junction. The name was borrowed from the tangled Gravelly Hill interchange in Birmingham, England, which opened in 1972 and has lent its nickname to knotted interchanges around the world.

Which stadium is home to Auckland's Blues Super Rugby side?

Eden Park. The ground began as a swamp that was drained for cricket in the early 1900s, and New Zealand's first Test cricket win came there in 1956, against the West Indies.

Which NRL club plays its home games at Auckland's Mt Smart Stadium?

New Zealand Warriors. They have played in Australia's premier rugby league competition since 1995, and players of Pacific Island heritage have long been at the heart of the side.

Which basketball team plays most of its home games at Auckland's Spark Arena?

New Zealand Breakers. Founded in 2003 to play in Australia's National Basketball League, they won the title three seasons running from 2011 to 2013.

Which part of Auckland's waterfront was rebuilt in the 1990s to host the America's Cup?

Viaduct Basin. After Team New Zealand won the Cup at San Diego in 1995, the city's old fishing harbour was redeveloped for the defence in 2000, and restaurants and superyachts followed.

Who was elected the first mayor of Auckland's amalgamated 'super city' council in 2010?

Len Brown. The Manukau mayor beat Auckland City's John Banks to lead a single council that replaced seven city and district councils and a regional council.

Dove-Myer 'Robbie' Robinson, Auckland's longest-serving mayor, made his name fighting a plan to pipe what into the sea off the city?

Raw sewage. In the late 1940s he led the campaign against discharging the city's untreated waste, then won approval for oxidation ponds to break it down naturally, and the fame carried him to the mayoralty in 1959.

What name was given to the retired British soldiers settled in villages around Auckland in the 1840s to defend it?

Fencibles. The word is a Scots form of 'defensible', and each man signed on for seven years at posts such as Howick in return for a cottage and an acre of land.

Early Auckland drew an unusually large share of its settlers from which country?

Ireland. Counts of the Irish share of the young town run from nearly a third in 1851 to about half, well above the share in the mainly English settlements further south.

Kauri gum, dug from old forest land and once among Auckland's main exports, was shipped overseas chiefly to make what?

Varnish. Makers in London and America judged the hardened resin superior to its rivals from the mid-1840s, so Māori and settlers dug it from ground where ancient kauri forests had stood.

Which thoroughfare is the main shopping and business spine of central Auckland?

Queen Street. It was laid out along the gully of the Waihorotiu Stream, which was later covered over and still runs unseen beneath the banks and shops.

Which park, Auckland's oldest, surrounds the War Memorial Museum?

The Domain. It fills the crater of Pukekawa, one of the oldest volcanoes in the Auckland field, with the museum standing on the rim and sports fields spread across the crater floor.

Which west-coast surf beach near Auckland gave its name to a long-running TV series about its lifeguards?

Piha. Piha Rescue began as an hour-long documentary about the surf club and grew into 12 seasons, filmed on a black ironsand beach that Lion Rock, once a Māori pā, splits in two.

Which Hauraki Gulf island, a ferry commute from downtown Auckland, is dotted with vineyards?

Waiheke. It is the largest and most built-up of the inner gulf islands and was a favourite beach resort by the 1890s, long before vineyards and fast ferries made parts of it a commuter suburb.

Which former governor's gifts began the Auckland Art Gallery's collection?

George Grey. He gave far more books than paintings: his rare books and manuscripts stocked the public library that shared the gallery's building, as an earlier gift had done in Cape Town.

Auckland joined UNESCO's Creative Cities Network in 2017 as a City of what?

Music. UNESCO added Auckland in 2017 as the heart of New Zealand's music industry, three years after Dunedin had joined the same network as a City of Literature.

In 1939 five centimetres of snow reportedly lay on which Auckland peak?

Mount Eden. Snow fell across the suburbs just before dawn on 27 July 1939 and stuck to the clothes of milkmen and policemen, in a winter when flakes reached even the Far North.

Which poet called Auckland 'Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart'?

Rudyard Kipling. The line comes from 'The Song of the Cities' of 1893, fifteen verses that tour the British Empire from Bombay and leave Auckland, which he had seen on a world tour, until last.

Which band wrote the 1987 song 'One Tree Hill' in memory of a roadie they had first met in Auckland?

U2. Greg Carroll joined their crew after a 1984 Auckland concert and died in a Dublin motorcycle crash in 1986; the song, on The Joshua Tree, reached number one in New Zealand.

In 1883 Auckland's university opened in which disused building, jail included?

Courthouse. Auckland University College began there with 95 students and four teaching staff; by the 2020s it was New Zealand's largest university, with more than 40,000 students.

Central Auckland lost mains power for five weeks in 1998 when what failed one after another?

Underground cables. All four of the 110-kilovolt cables feeding the centre gave out after a long, hot summer, and offices, shops and hospitals fell back on noisy diesel generators.

What caused the 2009 blackout across northern Auckland and all of Northland?

A forklift hit a power line. It was shifting a shipping container beneath the Ōtāhuhu to Henderson line while the other circuit was out for maintenance, and about 280,000 customers lost power on 30 October 2009.

Which power station, New Zealand's largest, burns coal and gas on the Waikato River south of Auckland?

Huntly. Its tall smoke stacks dominate the skyline beside the river, whose water cools the plant, and it was sited on the Waikato coalfield so it could burn local coal as well as piped gas.

Auckland first received natural gas in 1970 from which Taranaki field?

Kapuni. Drillers struck the field in 1959, and its piped gas replaced the gas that towns had made from coal, closing gasworks around the country.

Auckland's tunnelled light rail line, cancelled in 2024, was to run from the city centre via Mount Roskill to where?

The airport. The incoming government scrapped the scheme in January 2024, calling a price that had swelled to somewhere between 15 and 30 billion dollars unsustainable.

Which Games has Auckland hosted twice, in 1950 and 1990?

Commonwealth. The 1990 return came four years after 32 nations boycotted Edinburgh's Games, and it drew a then-record 55; in 1950 the event was still the British Empire Games.

Auckland staged which World Cup's final in 1987 and again in 2011?

Rugby union. New Zealand won both finals at home, taking the first Rugby World Cup 29–9 in 1987, then waited 24 years to lift the trophy again when the tournament returned in 2011.

Auckland's Round the Bays fun run finishes in which waterfront suburb?

St Heliers. The 8.4-kilometre run along Tāmaki Drive began in the early 1970s as the running boom took hold, and within a decade some 80,000 people were taking part.

Which was the main crop in the Māori gardens once spread across the Auckland isthmus?

Kūmara. Māori cleared much of the isthmus to grow the sweet potato in its rich volcanic soil, and the gardens fed a population that peaked at 20,000 or more.