Tāmaki Makaurau was farmed and fortified by Māori for 700 years before the first British Governor bought the isthmus in 1840. Three days trace that layering: terraced pā craters, colonial stone, and the working-class villa suburbs that grew around them.
Auckland's highest volcanic cone (196m) and one of the largest pre-European pā in the country — the terraces, kūmara storage pits and defensive ditches cut into the scoria around 1400 AD are still legible. Summit road closed to vehicles since 2011; walk up from Batger Rd.
The ground floor holds Hotunui (an 1878 carved meeting house) and Te Toki a Tapiri, the last great Māori war canoe, carved from a single tōtara in 1836 and able to carry 100 warriors. Open daily 10:00–17:00.
A 182m cone carrying the most extensive pre-contact earthworks in Tāmaki Makaurau — house terraces, pits and three crater rings that once held several thousand people. The obelisk on top was funded by John Logan Campbell in memory of Māori.
Built in 1841 for John Logan Campbell and Willam Brown on Shortland Street, this kauri cottage is the oldest surviving building in Auckland, moved to the park in 1920. Two rooms, an attic loft and the original brick chimney survive.
The 1929 neoclassical building is itself the country's principal WWI cenotaph. Upper floors carry the Gallipoli and Western Front galleries, a Spitfire Mk XVI and a Japanese Zero; the Hall of Memories lists Auckland's dead by name in marble.
Opened in 1959 as a four-lane span, it was widened in 1969 with Japanese-built clip-on lanes still nicknamed the Nippon clip-ons. The 1043m structure ended a century of ferry dependence between the city and the North Shore.
Covers Polynesian voyaging waka, the immigrant ships that carried settlers on 100-day passages, and the KZ1 America's Cup challenger. A reconstructed steerage cabin rolls underfoot to simulate the Tasman crossing.
Built in 1856 as the Governor's residence, it is the largest wooden building in New Zealand — kauri boards were milled and cut to imitate stone masonry. It served as the vice-regal home until the capital moved to Wellington in 1865.
Auckland's youngest volcano, erupted around 1400 AD and witnessed by Māori living on neighbouring Motutapu — footprints were preserved in the ash. The 1920s–30s baches built by Depression-era Aucklanders still stand at Islington Bay.
The 1857 stone chapel replaced an earlier building blown down in a gale; the surrounding graveyard holds early settlers, Māori chiefs and Bishop Selwyn's circle. The chapel sits above the bay where Auckland's first judges built their houses.
A near-intact street of 1880s–90s workers' cottages, protected as a heritage precinct — bay villas with cast-iron lacework built for shipwrights and labourers, later home to Pacific Island families before 1980s gentrification.
The 1873 Ponsonby Club Hotel, known as the Gluepot because workers got stuck there, was New Zealand's defining live-music pub until 1994. The Three Lamps junction takes its name from the gas lamp standard erected here in the 1860s.