Westland District

Westland is the green, wet, wild south of the Coast: Hokitika carving pounamu and throwing a wildfoods festival with a menu best not described before lunch, the glaciers at Franz Josef and Fox grinding down through the rainforest, and whitebait fritters that the locals will fight you over. It is also, reliably, one of the wettest inhabited places going.

This is a thin strip of country between the Alps and the Tasman, all rainforest, rivers and that famous turquoise water at the Hokitika Gorge. It’s remote, affordable and spectacular in equal measure, the kind of place you choose on purpose because nowhere else feels quite this alive.

There are 53 suburbs and localities across the district. This page gathers them so you can compare without guessing: who lives where, what it costs, how the schools sit, and how far each spot really is from the bigger centres.

Glaciers, greenstone and serious rain. Pick a suburb and have a look at Westland.