Te Wahipounamu – South West New Zealand

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Te Wahipounamu - A Unique World Heritage Landscape in South West New Zealand

Te Wahipounamu, meaning "the place where the greenstone comes from" in Māori, is a unique World Heritage Site located in the southwest corner of the South Island of New Zealand. Inscribed in 1990, this landscape has been sculpted by numerous glacial periods into a breathtaking array of geographical features, including fjords, rugged coastlines, towering cliffs, pristine lakes, and cascading waterfalls.

UNESCO Description of the World Heritage Site

The landscape in this park, situated in south-west New Zealand, has been shaped by successive glaciations into fjords, rocky coasts, towering cliffs, lakes and waterfalls. Two-thirds of the park is covered with southern beech and podocarps, some of which are over 800 years old. The kea, the only alpine parrot in the world, lives in the park, as does the rare and endangered takahe, a large flightless bird.

UNESCO Justification of the World Heritage Site

Criterion (vii): Te Wähipounamu - South West New Zealand contains many of the natural features which contribute to New Zealand's international reputation for superlative landscapes: its highest mountains, longest glaciers, tallest forests, wildest rivers and gorges, most rugged coastlines and deepest fiords and lakes, as well as the remnant of an extinct volcano in Solander Island. The temperate rainforests of the property are unmatched in their composition, extent and intactness by any such forests anywhere in the world. From the vast wilderness of Fiordland in the south to the spectacular upthrust of the Southern Alps in the north, the landscapes are world class for the sheer excellence of their scenic beauty. It is an area of magnificent primeval vistas: snow-capped mountains, glaciers, forests, tussock grasslands, lakes, rivers, wetlands and over 1000km of wilderness coastline. Only traces of human influence are evident and then mainly in peripheral areas.

Criterion (viii): Te Wähipounamu - South West New Zealand is considered to be the best modern example of the primitive taxa of Gondwanaland seen in modern ecosystems – and as such the property is of global significance. The progressive break-up of the southern super-continent of Gondwanaland is considered one of the most important events in the earth’s evolutionary history. New Zealand’s separation before the appearance of marsupials and other mammals, and its long isolation since, were key factors enabling the survival of the ancient Gondwanan biota on the islands of New Zealand to a greater degree than elsewhere. The living representatives of this ancient biota include flightless kiwis, carnivorous land snails, 14 species of podocarp and genera or beech. The South West is also an outstanding example of the impact of the Pleistocene epoch of earth history. Ice-carved landforms created by these “Ice Age” glaciers dominate the mountain lands, and are especially well-preserved in the harder, plutonic igneous rocks of Fiordland. Glacier-cut fiords, lakes, deep U-shaped valleys, hanging valleys, cirques, and ice-shorn spurs are graphic illustrations of the powerful influence of these glaciers on the landscape. Depositional landforms of Pleistocene glacial origin are also important, especially in Westland, west of the Alpine Fault. Chronological sequences of outwash gravels, and moraine ridges in elegant curves and loops, outline the shapes of both former piedmont glaciers and Holocene post-glacial valley glaciers.

Criterion (ix): A continuum of largely unmodified habitats, the property exhibits a high degree of geodiversity and biodiversity. Fresh-water, temperate rainforest and alpine ecosystems are all outstandingly well represented over an extensive array of landforms and across wide climatic and altitudinal gradients. Notable examples of on-going biological processes can be found in the large expanses of temperate rainforest, the plant succession after glacial retreat, soil/plant chronosequences on beach ridges, plant succession on alluvial terraces, vegetation gradients around the margins of glacial lakes and ecotypic differentiation of plants on ultramafic soils. The extensive and little modified freshwater habitats, the impressive diversity of alpine ecosystems, extensive alpine plant endemism, and on-going evolution associated with long-standing geographical isolation of animal populations, like the kiwi taxa of South-Westland, are further examples of on-going biological evolution. While there is little permanent physical evidence of past human interaction with the natural environment, tangata whenua (the indigenous people who have customary authority in a place) have long associations with the area which was significant to them for natural resources, particularly pounamu (nephrite). European associations are more recent and initially based on natural resource exploitation. The predominant human uses today are associated with sustainable tourism.

Criterion (x): The habitats of Te Wähipounamu contain an extensive range of New Zealand’s unusual endemic fauna, a fauna which reflects its long evolutionary isolation and absence of mammalian predators. The property contains the entire wild population of the rare and endangered takahë (Notornis mantelli), the entire population of the South Island subspecies of brown kiwi (Apteryx australis), New Zealands rarest Kiwi, the rowi (Apteryx rowi), the only significant remaining populations of the seriously declining mohua / yellowhead (Mohoua ochrocephala), the only large populations remaining of käkä and käkäriki / yellow-crowned parakeet, the only remaining population of pateke / Fiordland brown teal in the South Island. The world's rarest and heaviest parrot, käkäpö (Strigops habroptilus) survived in Fiordland until the early 1980s. It is now thought to be extinct on the mainland and its survival depends on careful management of a limited number of offshore island populations.

Encyclopedia Record: Te Wahipounamu

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IUCN World Heritage Outlook

The 2025 Conservation Outlook on Te Wāhipounamu – South West New Zealand reports the following assessment:

Source: International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) · View assessment