Fiordland National Park

Fiordland National Park (established in 1952) is a vast, remote wilderness, in 1990 Fiordland was listed as a United Nations World Heritage site and given the name Te Wahipounamu - 'the place of greenstone', after the area's most treasured mineral resource. Much of the region is inaccessible by road and the township of Te Anau is considered the gateway to the park. Located in the far south western corner of the South Island, Fiordland National Park is one of the great wilderness areas of the Southern Hemisphere. Fiordland National Park encompass an area filled with snow-capped mountains that reflect in the midnight blue fingers of ocean, rivers of ice, deep lakes, unbroken forests where you can find trees that are more than 800 years old and tussock grasslands producing a landscape of exceptional beauty. There are few places on earth that can compete with this remarkable natural environment. The remaining two thirds of Fiordland National Park are covered by virgin beech and podocarp forest. Some of the best examples of animals and plants, which were once found on the ancient super-continent of Gondwana, still exist here. A 500 kilometre network of walking tracks allows visitors to explore the primeval world of mountain peaks, alpine lakes and moss-carpeted valleys. The fourteen fiords that fringe the southwest corner of the South Island were 100,000 years in the making, with the final details added during the most recent ice age just 10,000 years ago. On all sides of the fiords, spectacular waterfalls tumble incessantly as the region's plentiful rainfall finds its way to the sea.