The adventure capital of the world — bungee jumping above Lake Wakatipu, ski fields, fiords, and the best craft beer scene in the southern hemisphere
Queenstown sits at the edge of Lake Wakatipu in New Zealand's South Island, ringed by the Remarkables mountain range and built almost entirely around the pursuit of adrenaline. AJ Hackett launched commercial bungee jumping here in 1988 — the Kawarau Bridge jump is still operating. Skiing at Coronet Peak and The Remarkables, jet boating on the Shotover River, skydiving, white-water rafting, paragliding — Queenstown stacks more extreme activities per square kilometer than almost anywhere on earth. When the heart rate drops, the town's Lakeside strip delivers some of New Zealand's best restauran…
Māori knew the Wakatipu basin as Whakatipu-waka-tāne, long used as a greenstone (pounamu) travel corridor. European settlers arrived in the 1860s during the Otago Gold Rush and named the town for its scenery — reportedly saying it was 'fit for a queen'. The gold rush collapsed within a decade, but pastoral farming and then tourism took over. The modern adventure tourism industry was essentially invented here when AJ Hackett and Henry van Asch made the first commercial bungee jump off the Kawarau Bridge in 1988, transforming a quiet lakeside resort into a global adrenaline destination.