Otago & Dunedin

Dunedin is the most Scottish of New Zealand's cities — settled by Free Church Presbyterians in 1848, built in Oamaru stone and Scots baronial style, and possessed of a certain northern melancholy and dry humour that suits the climate. The railway station is a masterpiece of Flemish Renaissance architecture. The campus of Otago University, the country's oldest, gives the city a youthful energy that its heritage buildings otherwise belie.

The Otago Peninsula is where nature takes over: a narrow finger of land extending into the Pacific Harbour, home to the world's only mainland albatross colony (Royal albatross nest here, just twenty minutes from the city centre), yellow-eyed penguins, little blue penguins, and the rare Hooker's sea lion. Wildlife encounters here are managed carefully and are all the more extraordinary for it. Further afield, the Catlins Coast to the south — waterfalls, petrified forests, fossilised dolphins in the limestone — rewards those who follow the road to its end.