New Zealand's largest metro wraps harbors between two ranges
Auckland's urban population is about 1,547,200 (June 2025), dominating New Zealand's North Island. The city sits between the Hauraki Gulf, Hunua Ranges, Manukau Harbour, and Waitākere Ranges. Auckland Council governs the wider region including outlying communities.
Māori settled the isthmus around 1350, drawn by its fertile soil, and built many fortified villages, or pā, mostly on the volcanic peaks; before Europeans arrived their numbers may have peaked at 20,000. By the early 1700s the Te Waiohua confederation held the isthmus, with major pā on One Tree Hill and Māngere Mountain. The Māori name Tāmaki Makaurau means Tāmaki desired by many, a nod to its rich resources. William Hobson made Auckland the colony's capital after 1840 and named it after George Eden, Earl of Auckland, then First Lord of the Admiralty.
During Hōne Heke's rebellion in the mid-1840s the government settled retired British soldiers and their families around the port as a defensive garrison, and in the early 1860s some 12,000 imperial troops based there for the campaign against the Māori King Movement gave local trade a big lift. Trams and railways drove growth in the early twentieth century, but after the Second World War the car came to dominate transport and the shape of the city.
Economic deregulation in the mid-1980s drew many head offices north from Wellington, making the region the nerve centre of the national economy, and from 1986 immigration rules opened to Asian migrants; by the 1990s the city had the world's largest Polynesian population, and by 2023 Asians made up 34.9 percent of residents. The University of Auckland, founded in 1883, is the country's largest. Locals call it the City of Sails or the Queen City, and its central business district fills a 433-hectare triangle beside the Waitematā Harbour.
Source: Auckland
