Auckland War Memorial Museum, Pukekawa Domain & Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Crowning two neighbouring hills just east of Queen Street are New Zealand's finest encyclopaedic museum and its oldest public art gallery: the Auckland War Memorial Museum (Tāmaki Paenga Hira) atop the volcanic crater rim of Pukekawa (Auckland Domain), and the kauri-canopied Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki on the edge of Albert Park.

1. Auckland War Memorial Museum (Tāmaki Paenga Hira) in Pukekawa Domain

• A 1929 Neoclassical Acropolis & 2006 Kauri Dome (aucklandmuseum.com): Consecrated on 28 November 1929 on the sacred volcanic hill of Pukekawa, the museum was built in gleaming white English Portland stone with a frieze inscribed with the battlefields of the First World War, expanded in the 1950s to honour the Second World War, and fitted in 2006 with a suspended copper-and-kauri wave dome inside its central courtyard.
• The Māori Court (He Taonga Māori) & Pacific Masterpieces (Ground Floor): The ground-floor galleries hold the world's most important collection of Māori and Pacific Island treasures (taonga). Three centrepieces stand out:
  • Hotunui (Carved Meeting House, 1878): A complete, richly carved Ngāti Maru ancestral meeting house (wharenui) built in Thames in 1878 as a wedding gift, where you remove your shoes before stepping inside beneath painted rafters (kōwhaiwhai) and woven reed panels (tukutuku).
  • Te Toki a Tapiri (1836 War Canoe): Measuring 25 metres (82 feet) long and hollowed from a single giant totara tree, this is the last great carved Māori war canoe (waka taua) surviving from the early nineteenth century, capable of carrying up to 100 paddlers.
  • Pacific & Natural History Galleries + Top-Floor War Memorial Hall: Upstairs, trace the geological birth of the Auckland Volcanic Field, see a reconstructed skeleton of the extinct giant moa, and walk the solemn Marble Hall of Memory and Spitfire fighter display on the top floor.
• The Domain Wintergardens (1913 to 1928, Free Entry): Just 200 metres north of the museum entrance sit two barrel-vaulted glasshouses designed by William Henry Gummer (one Temperate, one heated Tropical) framing a sunken lily courtyard and an open-air quarry fernery filled with native silver tree ferns (ponga).

2. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki & Albert Park

• 17,000 Works Beneath a Kauri Canopy (aucklandartgallery.com): Founded in 1888 at the corner of Kitchener and Wellesley Streets beside Victorian Albert Park, New Zealand's largest art institution combines its original 1887 French Renaissance château building with a soaring 2011 timber-and-glass atrium (named World Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival). General admission to the permanent collection is free; do not miss the deeply moving late-19th- and early-20th-century oil portraits of tattooed Māori rangatira (elders and chiefs) painted from life by Charles Frederick Goldie and Gottfried Lindauer, alongside works by Colin McCahon, Frances Hodgkins, and Rita Angus.