The Edinburgh of the South — where Scottish settlers built a Victorian city more intact than most Scottish cities, Baldwin Street (the world's steepest residential street) climbs 35 degrees above the Octagon's 1860s courthouse, the Otago Peninsula delivers yellow-eyed penguins, royal albatross, and New Zealand sea lions within 20 minutes of the city centre, and Larnach Castle (New Zealand's only castle) watches over the harbour from a volcanic headland
Dunedin (130,000; metro 145,000) is the second city of New Zealand's South Island and the largest city in Otago — a small city with disproportionate cultural weight as New Zealand's oldest European settlement (1848) and the location of the country's first university (University of Otago, 1869). The city's Victorian and Edwardian architecture (Dunedin Railway Station, the Octagon, Municipal Chambers, St Paul's Cathedral) survives more completely than almost any comparable British colonial city because Dunedin's economic growth stopped in the 1880s when gold ran out — there was no money to demo…
The Kāti Māmoe and then the Kāi Tahu (Ngāi Tahu) peoples occupied the Otago Peninsula and surrounding area for several centuries before European contact — the area around Ōtākou (the original Māori name for the harbour) was one of the densest Māori population centres in the South Island. Captain William Cargill and the Rev. Thomas Burns (nephew of Robert Burns) led the 'Otago Scheme' — a Free Church of Scotland colonisation project that arrived in 1848 with the ships John Wickliffe and Philip Laing, establishing a Scots-Presbyterian settlement as a deliberate alternative to the Church of Engl…