The garden city rebuilt from ruins — where the 2011 earthquake that killed 185 people and destroyed the cathedral prompted the most ambitious urban renewal in the Southern Hemisphere, the Ōtākaro Avon River Corridor turned a flood zone into a linear park, and street art transformed empty lots into an outdoor gallery that became one of the defining images of the city's resurrection
Christchurch (380,000; metro 420,000) is the largest city on New Zealand's South Island and the gateway to some of the most spectacular landscapes in the world — Aoraki/Mount Cook (3 hours west), the Mackenzie Basin's Lake Tekapo (famous for some of the darkest skies in the world), Banks Peninsula's French colonial port of Akaroa (1 hour south), and the Kaikōura whale-watching coast (2 hours north). The city is defined by the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes — the 22 February 2011 earthquake (6.3 Mw, shallow and close to the city centre) killed 185 people and destroyed or damaged 80% of t…
The Canterbury Plains where Christchurch sits were occupied by Ngāi Tahu Māori, who called the area Ōtautahi (after a leader named Tautahi). The Canterbury Association (a group of English Anglicans led by John Robert Godley) established Christchurch in 1850 as a planned Church of England settlement — naming it after Christ Church college, Oxford. The city was designed on a formal English grid plan with an Avon River (named for the English Avon) running through its centre and the 1864 Christchurch Cathedral (Gothic Revival, designed by George Gilbert Scott's office) at its symbolic heart. The…