Fiordland National Park

Interesting facts

The park covers about 12,600 square kilometres and makes up nearly half of the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Site in south-west New Zealand.

Some of its fiords reach as far as 40 kilometres inland from the Tasman Sea.

Lake Poteriteri, in the south of the park, is the largest lake in New Zealand with no road access.

The Milford Track was opened in 1889 by Quintin McKinnon and Donald Sutherland, and a 1908 article in The Spectator called it the finest walk in the world.

Captain James Cook named Dusky Sound Dusky Bay in 1770 and later sheltered there with HMS Resolution on his second voyage.

A public petition campaign in the 1970s stopped plans to raise Lake Manapouri for hydroelectric power, and the lake was given legal protection.

Offshore islands within the park, such as Anchor and Secretary Islands, serve as predator-free refuges for kākāpō, kiwi and other rare birds.

The takahē population, managed from a 500-square-kilometre protected area in the Murchison Mountains, had climbed to about 300 birds by 2016.

Its mountains and fiords have stood in for other worlds in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Alien: Covenant.

Red deer introduced in the 1850s became such a pest that helicopter culling began here in the early 1960s.

Why it is worth it

Fiordland is New Zealand's largest national park by a wide margin, 1.2 million hectares of temperate rainforest and 14 fjords gouged out by glaciers that retreated long enough ago for forest to reclaim nearly every slope down to the waterline. Rudyard Kipling once called Milford Sound the eighth wonder of the world, and the sound alone gets roughly 6,000 to 8,000 millimetres of rain a year — several times London's annual total — spread across some 180 days.

That rain does something specific underwater that most visitors never see. Runoff stained brown by forest tannins settles into a layer up to 10 metres deep on top of the denser seawater, and that dark layer filters sunlight so effectively that light conditions at 10 metres underwater match what you'd normally find at 70 metres in the open ocean. The effect is that black coral — a species that anywhere else needs depths beyond recreational diving limits — grows here at just 10 metres down, well within reach of an ordinary dive. The fjord looks calm on the surface; underneath, the rain is running an entirely different depth simulation.

The park's other headline story is a bird that was declared functionally gone. The takahē, a large flightless rail, was believed extinct for more than forty years until a small population turned up in the remote Murchison Mountains in 1948 — inside what's now Fiordland. It's still rare, still carefully managed, and still here specifically because this particular patch of mountains was remote enough that nobody had finished looking.

Good to know

Much of Fiordland is accessible only by a single road in and out, or by boat and foot track; weather can close roads to Milford Sound with little warning.

Best time to visit

November through April for the most reliable weather and access, though rain — and the waterfalls it creates — is a feature here in any season.

Getting there

137 km from Invercargill. Invercargill Airport (IVC) is about 137 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Fiordland National Park is a national park in the south-west corner of South Island of New Zealand. It is the largest of the 13 national parks in New Zealand, with an area of 12,607 km² (4,868 sq mi). The park occupies almost half of the area of Te Wāhipounamu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site established in 1990, and is administered by the Department of Conservation (DOC). The southern ranges of the Southern Alps cover most of Fiordland National Park, combined with the deep glacier-carved valleys.

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