Standing on the volcanic cone of Rangitoto Island – 260 meters above the sea, loose scoria shifts under your boots with every step as wind rushes off the Hauraki Gulf cooling your face.
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And when you look out in any direction, you see islands amid pale-blue seas and back there the skyline of Auckland sits low on the horizon, nearly lost. Meantime a Tui – a native song bird – calls through the silence before disappearing, leaving you with nothing but a gray sky threatening a gorgeous seascape of islands and inlets.
The name Rangitoto translates as “the day the sky ran blood.”
You see, this volcanic island rose from the ocean about 600 years ago*1, and people actually stood on far shores and watched the thing happen!
So how a volcano just appears is a question worth pondering – because this didn’t happen over some distant geological time-line; instead it was fast and violent and within living memory.
Rangitoto – The Volcano That Punched Biggest
Auckland sits on top of around 50 volcanoes, and most of them are old enough that centuries of vegetation and later the city grew over and around them. You’ll find parks and suburbs where craters used to be, and people live on those ‘hills’ without giving the ground beneath them much thought.
But Rangitoto stands apart from the rest of the field as the youngest and largest volcano in the area, and the only one that erupted while Māori were already living here.
Footprints were discovered pressed into Rangitoto ash on the surface of Motutapu Island, which means someone was standing close enough to feel the heat when ash started falling.
The eruption happened in two main phases around 1450 and 1500 AD, and the sheer scale of the event was almost hard to believe. The 2.3 cubic kilometers of material that poured out of Rangitoto was nearly as much as every previous Auckland eruption combined over the last 200,000 years.
Geologists estimate that Rangitoto matched that massive total in somewhere between 5 and 10 years of active eruption; it didn’t bother building up slowly, rather it punched through the seafloor and just kept going.
What remains today is a shield volcano 5.5 kilometers wide covered in 2311 hectares (5,710 acres) of basalt.
You won’t find river valleys or normal soil here, just fractured lava and the largest Pōhutukawa forest – red-clustered flowers – on earth growing straight out of shattered black rock.
And the ecology of the island is still putting itself together through a process scientists call primary succession. You can see every stage of life happening at once, from scrub on the bare lava to dense canopy where the older flows have broken down.
Researchers are currently measuring carbon dioxide seeping through the ground and running isotope analysis to find the source of the gas. They are trying to determine if the volcano is still connected to a magma source deep below the surface.
Volcanic gas has never been detected in Auckland before, and if they find it here, it changes everything we thought about this island and the city sitting around it.
Māori Myths and Rangitoto
Most people know the island as Rangitoto, but it’s a shortened version of its full name, Ngā Rangi-i-totongia-a Tama-te-kapua.
When you translate that, it means “the days of the bleeding of Tama-te-kapua,” which has nothing to do with volcanic fire or the glow of red lava. The name is actually a record of a battle.
Tama-te-kapua served as the captain of the Arawa waka, which was one of the great ancestral canoes used during the Māori migration to these shores. He eventually fought a battle at Islington Bay right on the edge of this island against the Tainui tribe, but he lost the fight and ended up badly wounded. The island took his blood into its name so the memory of that day would never fade.
Another Māori myth involves a couple of supernatural beings that get into deep trouble with a fire goddess … and subsequently, lose their home (it’s a long story).
Because Rangitoto Island is just rock with no fresh water, Māori never lived there permanently, but it was somewhere to rise Kākā birds and go fishing and hunting, and some lava caves became burial sites.
Today, the Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki and Ngāti Paoa tribes still hold deep ancestral ties the island.
Exploring Rangitoto Island
The ferry ride from downtown Auckland takes 25 minutes, and Rangitoto volcano grows larger and more symmetrical the closer you get.
Once you step off the boat, the first thing you do is brush your boots (for stray seeds and other contaminants). Note: This isn’t a polite request – but a MUST.
After decades of work, Rangitoto was declared free of flora and fauna pests – including rats, cats, rabbits, stoats, mice, possums and hedgehogs in 2011, protecting the original native habitat and also becoming a sanctuary for protected birds such as the North Island Saddleback.
If you take the coastal path heading clockwise, you will run into the baches first.
Out of the original 140 holiday houses, only 30 remain. These small wooden homes were built in the 1920s and 30s on public land without permission, and the later government banned new buildings in 1937 and eventually demolished most of them.
The coastal track eventually turns inland where the geology starts to dominate the experience.
You can hear the scoria shifting and crunching under your feet with every single step you take. Pōhutukawa trees close in overhead with thick branches, and the melodic bursts of Tui amid the rustling of wind against the canopy.
When you get about 200 meters from the summit, you’ll see a sign to the lava caves. These are low-ceilinged tubes that formed when the outer skin of a lava flow hardened while the molten rock inside kept moving and eventually drained out. Trees grow right out of the entrances, and once you step inside, the rock absorbs every bit of sound until it feels like a different kind of quiet.
The summit is a different world to the bush below. The crater is overgrown and silent with no obvious signs of the fire it once produced, while the Hauraki Gulf opens up in every direction around you.
On a hot day a rewarding sea breeze whips through the trees and the city skyline looks so small – it’s definitely a place that arrived long after the island had already made up its mind.
Travel Info
- To reach the Rangitoto Island, you’ll need to catch a Fullers360 Ferry from the wharves of the Auckland CBD, which costs $NZ 60 for an adult return or $27 for children.
- Book online because departures are limited.
- Rangitito Island FERRY TIMETABLE: On weekdays, the boat leaves at 9:30 AM and stops at Devonport, while the weekend schedule offers extra sailings at 9:15 and 10:30.
- The final ferry departs the island at 15:30, and you really don’t want to miss that boat unless you’re prepared to pay for a very expensive private pickup.
- Since there are no cafes or shops on the island, you need to pack lunch and 1.5 liters of water.
- Sturdy shoes are best, and you’ll want a torch (or phone light) for exploring the caves along with sunscreen during summer.
- Don’t litter; carry your trash.
- You are required to use the cleaning station to scrub your boots on the arrival jetty so’s to protect the ecosystem.
Travels in New Zealand – 2018
Footnote: *1 Sources vary on the date of first eruption of Rangitoto. Some give 6,000 years while others drop a zero, making it 600. Yet, there’s no dispute that the last eruption was around 550 years ago.
