Auckland runs on volcanoes, harbour and free public space — cones you can climb at no cost, glasshouses and a national art collection that ask only a koha, and carpark night markets where dinner lands under NZ$14. Three days on roughly NZ$60 a day.
Auckland's highest volcanic cone at 196m, with a 50m-deep grass crater named Te Ipu Kai a Mataaho. The summit road is closed to private cars, so the 15-minute climb from Puhi Huia Road costs nothing; gates open 7am.
Two 1920s glasshouses — a cool house of camellias and begonias, a tropical house of orchids — plus a fernery built into an old scoria quarry. Entry is by koha; open 9am to 4.30pm daily inside the 75-hectare Domain.
New Zealand's largest art collection — around 17,000 works, including Gottfried Lindauer's Māori portraits — sits under a kauri-canopy roof on Kitchener Street. General admission is free, 10am to 5pm, with paid ticketed shows upstairs.
A working cement silo turned public waterfront space, with free outdoor films on summer Friday nights, skate ramps and a splash pad. Cross the Te Wero lifting bridge from the Viaduct and watch the sun drop behind the container cranes.
A warehouse market on St Georges Bay Road, Saturdays 8am to 1.30pm and Sundays 9am to 1.30pm. Around 90 stalls sell crêpes, pastries from NZ$4 and cheese offcuts, and traders discount produce boxes in the last half hour.
Auckland's grittiest strip runs 1.2km above the motorway: roti canai at Uncle Man's, bánh mì near Cross Street, Turkish kebabs under neon. Most mains stay under NZ$18, and St Kevins Arcade's back window frames the harbour for nothing.
A 400m run of Chinese and Taiwanese kitchens around the Balmoral shops. Barilla Dumpling does 15 boiled pork dumplings for about NZ$12 and Eden Noodles' chilli wontons cost much the same; cash moves the queue faster at peak.
A rotating carpark food market — Glenfield on Saturdays, Papatoetoe on Fridays — with 40-plus stalls doing takoyaki, Uyghur hand-pulled noodles and Hokkien mee from 5.30pm to 11pm. Entry is free and most plates run NZ$8-14.
Ferry from Downtown Pier 1 costs about NZ$8.50 one way with an AT HOP card and takes 12 minutes; from the wharf it is a 20-minute walk to a headland riddled with free WWI tunnels and disappearing gun pits.
Ten minutes over the hill from North Head lies a 700m stretch of pale sand looking straight at Rangitoto Island. Swimming and the surf club's outdoor showers cost nothing, and Devonport's bakeries sell mince pies for around NZ$6.
A 182m cone topped by a 1940 obelisk over Sir John Logan Campbell's grave, ringed by Māori terracing and working sheep paddocks. Free from dawn to dusk; the summit road is walk-only, about 25 minutes up from the Greenlane gate.
A free clifftop garden and 1940 mausoleum above Ōkahu Bay, looking down the Waitematā to Rangitoto. Bus 767 or a 40-minute walk along Tamaki Drive gets you there, and the reflecting-pool lawn is an open picnic spot into the evening.