Matamata

Where it sits. Matamata is a farming town of around eight thousand people on the eastern edge of the Waikato plain, tucked against the foot of the Kaimai Range in New Zealand's North Island. The land here is flat, deep and generous — volcanic ash laid down by eruptions from the Taupō and Rotorua centres, drained through the twentieth century into some of the most productive pasture in the country. Broadway, the main street, runs dead straight through the middle of town with angle parking either side; from its shopfronts you can see the Kaimai ridge rising sharply to the east, often with cloud caught along its spine. State Highway 27 skirts the western side, connecting to Auckland in about two hours and to Tauranga over the range in around one.

The town's own history. European settlement here dates from the 1860s and is bound up with Josiah Clifton Firth, a Auckland merchant who accumulated a vast estate on land in the Matamata block and set about draining swamp, clearing scrub and planting grass. His 1882 tower house — Firth Tower, a squat three-storey concrete blockhouse with gun slits, built as much for security as for the view over his holdings — still stands on Tower Road three kilometres from the centre, now the anchor of a small museum precinct with a relocated schoolhouse, church and settler cottages. Firth's estate ran to tens of thousands of hectares at its height and was worked with drainage gangs, imported grass seed and one of the first traction engines in the country; it passed out of his hands during the depression of the 1880s and was progressively subdivided, which is how the district arrived at its present pattern of family-scale dairy units. Long before that the district sat within the rohe of Ngāti Hauā, whose chief Wiremu Tamihana played a central role in the Kīngitanga, the Māori King Movement, in the 1850s and 1860s.

Horses, and what the town actually does. Matamata's real economy is dairy and thoroughbreds. The district is one of the two great racehorse-training centres in New Zealand, with training barns, stud farms and gallops spread across the flats north and west of town; white post-and-rail fencing along the roads out is the giveaway. Trackwork happens at dawn, and the Matamata Racing Club's course on Firth Street holds meetings through the season. The combination — cows, horses, a compact grid of shops — is what the town was for a century, and it still is between tour buses.

On screen. Matamata is the service town for the Hobbiton Movie Set, which sits about eight kilometres southwest on the Alexander family's farm on Buckland Road. The set is not in Matamata and cannot be seen from it, but the town is where most visitors start: the i-SITE visitor centre on Broadway was rebuilt as a cluster of thatched, timbered hobbit-style buildings and doubles as a tour departure point, and the town's welcome signs read "Welcome to Hobbiton". Peter Jackson's crew based here during the 1999 shoot and again during the 2011 return for The Hobbit, and the association has reshaped the local trade — cafés, motels and a rental fleet that would be improbable for a town this size otherwise.

What else is close. Wairere Falls, the tallest waterfall in the North Island at roughly 153 metres, drops off the Kaimai escarpment about fifteen kilometres northeast of town at the end of Goodwin Road. The track climbs steadily through nikau and rimu to a lower lookout in around forty-five minutes, and continues to the top of the falls in a further hour of steeper going. The Opal Hot Springs on the northern edge of town draw geothermally heated water into open-air pools. Te Aroha, forty minutes north at the foot of its own mountain, has an Edwardian bathhouse domain and the Mokena Geyser, a soda-water geyser that erupts on a roughly hourly cycle and is thought to be the only one of its kind anywhere. The Kaimai Mamaku Forest Park offers longer ridge walks over to the Bay of Plenty side, and the Hauraki Rail Trail's southern extensions bring cycle traffic through the district.

Getting there and timing. Matamata is on State Highway 27 with an easy run north to Auckland and south to Tirau, where the highway forks for Rotorua and Taupō. There is no scheduled passenger rail; intercity coaches call at Broadway. Late spring through autumn gives the reliable weather — Waikato winters are wet, and the Wairere Falls track becomes greasy underfoot. Accommodation in town is inexpensive by New Zealand standards and dramatically cheaper than Rotorua an hour away, which makes it a sensible overnight base if you want an early tour slot at the film set rather than a mid-afternoon one. The main street is flat and fully kerb-ramped; Firth Tower's grounds are level, though the tower's internal stairs are steep and narrow.