The southernmost city in the world with a street grid — where Invercargill sits on the Southland Plains at 46.4° south latitude (further south than any point in continental Europe, North America, or most of Asia, and at the same latitude as the Falkland Islands) and its extraordinarily flat and wide city streets (Dee Street is 40 metres wide — wider than the Champs-Élysées) reflect its Victorian founders' ambitions for a great colonial city that instead became a quiet Southland market town, the E. Hayes & Sons hardware store (Dee Street — a working 1890s hardware store with a collection of iconic New Zealand jet boats, motorcycles, and the world's original Burt Munro Indian motorcycle from 'The World's Fastest Indian') is one of the most unusual shopping experiences in New Zealand, Fiordland National Park (the largest national park in New Zealand, containing Milford Sound) is 2 hours' drive north, and Stewart Island (Rakiura) — New Zealand's third-largest island and one of the least-visited places in the country — is accessible by ferry from Bluff (27 km south)
Invercargill (58,000 city; 100,000 Southland region) is the southernmost city in New Zealand and the southernmost significant city in the world — the commercial capital of the Southland region at the southern tip of the South Island. Invercargill is the gateway to Fiordland (Milford Sound, Doubtful Sound, Kepler Track), Stewart Island (Rakiura), and the Catlins Coast (the least-visited stretch of the South Island's scenic coastline).
Invercargill was founded in 1856 on the traditional territory of Ngāi Tahu, the predominant iwi of the South Island. The city was named for Captain William Cargill of the Otago settlement — 'Inver' being a Gaelic prefix meaning 'at the mouth of' (reflecting the many Scottish settlers who built Invercargill, from the Southland province's predominantly Scottish immigrant population). The wide streets of Invercargill were laid out by John Turnbull Thomson, Otago Province's chief surveyor, with 40-metre-wide main streets designed for a city expected to rival Dunedin — an ambition that was never r…