Hiking around Lyttelton Harbour and Banks Peninsula

Historic bays, hills, and modern walkways

Banks Peninsula: Cropped from earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/3217/christchurch-new-zealand. North near top but not quite at top.

BANKS Peninsula is an eroded volcano, originally an offshore island, which possesses several natural harbours today.

The biggest harbours on the peninsula are Lyttelton Harbour or Te Whakaraupō (‘the harbour of the raupō reed’) just south of Christchurch, which contains the port of Lyttelton, and Akaroa Harbour further east, on the south side, which contains the much smaller village of Akaroa.

Over a long period of time, the plains of Canterbury have grown outward toward the peninsula so that it is no longer an island, just as debris from the mountains has also done at Kaikōura, another former island.

The Port Hills, between Christchurch and Lyttelton, are full of parks and reserves, scenic drives in the form of the Summit Road and Mount Pleasant Road, and rock-climbing cliffs.

They yield stunning views of the city and its port of Lyttelton.

A view from the Christchurch Port Hills, showing Te Karoro Karoro or the Brighton Spit, which guards the estuary of the Avon and Heathcote Rivers and is ‘away from it all’ even though it’s in a city. On the near side of the unbridged estuary is another seaside resort called Sumner. We stayed at the South Brighton Holiday Park, on the spit.