Nelson, New Zealand

Where it sits. Nelson sits at the head of Tasman Bay, at the top of the South Island, sheltered from the west by the Bryant and Richmond ranges and from the north by the long curving sandspit of the Boulder Bank — thirteen kilometres of grey granite cobbles moved south by longshore drift, which forms the natural breakwater that made the harbour usable and effectively decided where the city would be. The population is around fifty thousand, the city sprawls along the coast toward Richmond, and the setting gives it two things that shape everything else: a great deal of sunshine, consistently among the highest annual totals in New Zealand, and immediate access to three national parks.

A New Zealand Company town. Nelson was founded in 1841 and 1842 as the second organised settlement of the New Zealand Company, after Wellington, on land whose purchase was contested from the beginning. The early years were hard — the promised agricultural land largely did not exist in the quantities advertised — and the settlement's history includes the Wairau Affray of 1843, when a party of armed settlers attempting to arrest Ngāti Toa chiefs Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata over a survey dispute was defeated with substantial loss of life, an event that shaped colonial policy for years. The city's street grid, laid out early, still runs to Trafalgar Street as the main axis, which climbs to Church Hill and the Christ Church Cathedral. That building has an unusual story of its own: begun in 1925 in Tākaka marble, redesigned repeatedly as engineers reconsidered the seismic risk of the original heavy tower, and not consecrated as complete until the 1960s, which is why the finished thing reads as neither wholly Gothic nor wholly modern.

On screen. Nelson's Middle-earth connection is not a landscape but a workshop. Jens Hansen Gold and Silversmith, on Trafalgar Square in the centre of town, was commissioned to make the One Ring for the film trilogy — the plain gold band that carries most of the story. The workshop produced a set of rings in different sizes for different purposes, including substantially oversized versions for macro photography, and the design work was completed before Jens Hansen himself died in 1999, several years before the first film was released. The business is still run by his family in the same premises, still makes jewellery, and sells authorised replicas; it is a genuinely interesting small manufacturing workshop rather than a film-merchandise counter, and you can watch bench work through the window. Nelson is also the practical base for two of the most striking location sites in the country: Mount Owen, which was Dimrill Dale, and Tākaka Hill, which was the Chetwood Forest, both within a couple of hours by road.

What you actually see today. A compact centre that is walkable end to end in twenty minutes, with the Saturday market on Montgomery Square — one of the country's longest-running and strongest for produce, craft and food stalls. The Suter Art Gallery, established in the 1890s beside Queens Gardens, holds a good regional collection. Founders Heritage Park assembles relocated period buildings on the edge of the city. The World of WearableArt began in Nelson in 1987 as a small rural show and grew into a national event; although the performance moved to Wellington, the collection is displayed in a museum here alongside a classic car collection. Tahunanui Beach gives shallow, safe swimming and a long stretch of sand. The Centre of New Zealand monument on Botanical Hill, a fifteen-minute climb from town, is a good viewpoint and a mild fraud — it marks the zero point of the nineteenth-century geodetic survey rather than the country's geographic centre.

Getting there and timing. Nelson has a domestic airport with frequent flights from Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, and is about two hours by road from Picton and the Cook Strait ferries. It is the gateway to Abel Tasman National Park, an hour away, Kahurangi National Park to the west and Nelson Lakes National Park to the south. Summer is warm, dry and busy, with accommodation tight from Christmas through January. Autumn is settled and quiet. The region's food and drink are worth planning around: hops have been grown here since the nineteenth century and Nelson is the centre of New Zealand brewing, with a significant wine industry on the Waimea plains and orchards throughout.