Queenstown Highlights
A curated tour of Queenstown's most iconic sights, from the lakefront and Bob's Peak to gold-rush Arrowtown and a day trip to Milford Sound.
Trip Stops
- 1
This 14.75-hectare botanic garden sits on its own peninsula jutting into Lake Wakatipu and has been a town fixture since 1867 — old enough that some of its towering Douglas firs are heritage listed. It doubles as an unofficial sports complex, hosting everything from lawn bowls and disc golf to an outdoor ice rink in winter.
📍 Queenstown, Otago, New Zealand
- 2
Queenstown's lakefront promenade sits on the shore of Lake Wakatipu, a long Z-shaped lake carved by glaciers that is famous for a natural 'tide' — its water level rises and falls a few centimetres roughly every 25 minutes, a seiche effect debated by scientists for over a century.
📍 Queenstown, Otago, New Zealand
- 3
Launched the same year as the Titanic (1912), this coal-fired twin-screw steamer is the only surviving commercial passenger-carrying coal-fired steamship in the Southern Hemisphere. She was built in Dunedin, dismantled plate by numbered plate, hauled by rail to Kingston, and rebuilt on the lakeshore — and she's still hand-fired with coal today.
📍 Queenstown, Otago, New Zealand
- 4
Opened in 1967, this is billed as the steepest cable car lift in the Southern Hemisphere, climbing about 450-480 metres up Ben Lomond's Bob's Peak in around five minutes. At the top you get a 220-degree panorama, plus the option to ride back down on the Skyline Luge — a gravity go-kart invented in New Zealand.
📍 Queenstown, Otago, New Zealand
- 5
Operating on the Shotover River since 1965, these jet boats skim through the narrow Shotover Canyon at up to 85 km/h in as little as 10 cm of water, executing full 360-degree spins centimetres from the rock walls. The Shotover was historically one of the richest gold-bearing rivers in the world, second only to the Klondike.
📍 Arthurs Point, Otago, New Zealand
- 6
Built in 1880 as a gold-rush access route, this 43-metre-high bridge became the birthplace of commercial bungy jumping when AJ Hackett opened it in 1988 — the world's first permanent commercial bungy site. It's now a Category I historic place that still carries jumpers, walkers and cyclists on the Queenstown Trail.
📍 Gibbston, Otago, New Zealand
- 7
This gold-rush town sprang up almost overnight after a Māori shearer named Jack Tewa found gold in the Arrow River in 1862 — within a year over 1,500 miners were camped along its banks. More than 60 original buildings survive on tree-lined Buckingham Street, along with a restored Chinese Settlement documenting the Cantonese miners who worked here into the 1920s.
📍 Arrowtown, Otago, New Zealand
- 8
Opened in 1947 with a single rope tow, Coronet Peak is New Zealand's oldest commercial ski field and still one of its most popular, thanks to being just 20 minutes from Queenstown. In summer the lifts keep running for mountain biking and sightseeing, with views stretching over Lake Wakatipu and Lake Hayes.
📍 Queenstown, Otago, New Zealand
- 9
Named by surveyor Alexander Garvie in the 1850s, this jagged 2,319-metre-high range is reputedly one of only two mountain ranges in the world that run directly north-south. Its Māori name, Kawarau, also gave the Kawarau River its name, and the range's Lake Alta ski basin sits in a glacial cirque below the twin summit of Double Cone.
📍 Queenstown, Otago, New Zealand
- 10
This tiny lakeside settlement of a few hundred people sits at the head of Lake Wakatipu, ringed by the Humboldt and Richardson ranges. Its dramatic scenery — including nearby Paradise — has stood in for Middle-earth and Narnia on screen, and the surrounding wilderness was certified the Tāhuna Glenorchy Dark Sky Sanctuary in 2025.
📍 Glenorchy, Otago, New Zealand
- 11
Despite the name, Milford Sound is technically a fiord, carved by glaciers rather than rivers, and was voted the world's top travel destination in a 2008 international TripAdvisor survey. It receives roughly 1,000mm of rain a month yet remains New Zealand's most visited natural attraction, with Mitre Peak rising over 1,600 metres straight from the water.
📍 Milford Sound, Southland, New Zealand
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