Cathedral Cove

Where it sits. Cathedral Cove — Mautohe to Ngāti Hei — is a white-sand beach on the eastern side of the Coromandel Peninsula, in the southern part of Mercury Bay, immediately north of the settlement of Hahei. Its defining feature is a vaulted natural archway cut through a headland of pale volcanic rock, joining two small beaches so that at low water walkers can pass from one to the other beneath a ceiling some fifteen metres high. The surrounding water is protected as Te Whanganui-o-Hei (Cathedral Cove) Marine Reserve, an 840-hectare no-take area running from Cook Bluff in the northwest to the northern end of Hahei Beach, and taking in Motukorure, Waikaranga, Okorotere and the northern end of Mahurangi Island offshore.

The story behind it. The Māori name for Mercury Bay, Te Whanganui-o-Hei, means the great bay of Hei, a tohunga who travelled on the Te Arawa waka and claimed this coast for his people, marking his territory by naming an offshore island for the curve of his own nose. The rock is soft, pale ignimbrite and tuff laid down by the Coromandel's volcanic activity and since undercut by the sea, which is why the arch exists at all and also why blocks fall from the cliffs from time to time. The marine reserve, one of New Zealand's earliest, has allowed snapper, crayfish and kelp forest to recover to a degree visible to anyone who snorkels the boulder edges of the cove.

On screen. The cove supplied the passage back into Narnia in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008). Andrew Adamson's production began filming in Auckland on 12 February 2007, and the sequence in which the four Pevensie children are pulled off a London Underground platform and step out onto a beach beside the ruins of Cair Paravel was shot here. The filmmakers chose the location specifically because the arch reads as a tunnel, rhyming visually with the railway tunnel the children enter moments earlier in the story. The castle ruins themselves were added digitally and in Prague; what is real on screen is the arch, the sand and the sea stacks offshore. The cove also appears in the music video for Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's "Can't Hold Us".

What has changed recently. Cyclone Gabrielle tore through the Coromandel in February 2023 and destabilised the clifftop walking track, which closed for almost two years while the Department of Conservation assessed whether it could be rebuilt at all. The rerouted Mautohe Cathedral Cove Track reopened on 1 December 2024; the older link from Hahei Beach to the Grange Road track entrance remains closed because of land instability. During the closure, boat and kayak operators from Hahei became the main way in, and they remain the easiest option for anyone who would rather not walk. Cathedral Cove has also been named as one of four New Zealand natural attractions proposed for an international visitor charge in the range of NZ$20 to NZ$40.

What you actually see today. From the Grange Road car park the walking track runs about 45 minutes each way along the clifftop, with side spurs down to Gemstone Bay and Stingray Bay, before a steep set of steps drops to the sand. Gemstone Bay has a snorkel trail marked by buoys where snapper, blue maomao and stingrays are routinely seen. The arch is best walked through in the two hours either side of low tide; at high water the passage floods and the two beaches are separated. There is no food, no fresh water and no shade at the cove itself, and the site now receives on the order of 150,000 visitors a year, most of them between mid-morning and mid-afternoon in January.

Getting there and timing. Hahei is about 2 hours 45 minutes from Auckland by road via the Kopu bridge and Whitianga, or a shorter run from Tairua. Parking at Hahei is restricted in summer, with a shuttle running from the village to the track entrance during peak season. Water taxis, guided kayak trips and small boat tours leave from Hahei Beach and take roughly ten minutes. Hot Water Beach, ten minutes south, sits above a geothermal fissure where visitors dig their own pools in the sand for two hours either side of low tide, and the headland pā site at Te Pare Point above Hahei gives a long view down the coast towards the cove. Late spring and autumn give warm water without the January congestion; winter brings quieter tracks and dramatic swell, though the sea is cold and easterly storms can close the coast. Sturdy shoes matter more than most visitors expect — the track has steps, roots and clay sections that turn slick after rain.