Three days in Dunedin: a gold rush city that spent it all on architecture

Start in the Octagon, which is what it says: an eight sided space in the middle of town with a statue of Robert Burns in it, back to the cathedral and face to the pub, which the locals point out with some satisfaction. The town hall, the art gallery, the Anglican cathedral and the old theatre all front onto it.

Walk five minutes downhill to the railway station, which is the reason most people photograph Dunedin. It opened in 1906, designed by a railways architect whose enthusiasm for turrets and stonework earned him the nickname Gingerbread George, and it is a dark basalt and pale limestone confection with a clock tower, a mosaic booking hall floor made of around 725,000 porcelain tiles, and stained glass locomotives in the windows. Scheduled passenger services stopped in 2002. Go up to the balcony and look down at the floor.

Next door, in the old Edwardian galleries and an art deco bus station, is the settlers museum. It covers who came to Otago and why, from the Kāi Tahu occupation through the Scottish free church settlement and the gold rush to the present, and the wall of portrait photographs of the early settlers staring back at you is the part people remember.

Eat somewhere on the way back up the hill. Everything in the centre is within ten minutes of everything else.

The Otago Peninsula runs twenty kilometres north east from the city along the far side of the harbour, and the low road hugs the water the whole way with no guard rail and, in places, lanes narrower than the buses that use them. Drive it slowly, or take a tour, and give the whole day to it.

Stop first at the house on the ridge. William Larnach was a banker and cabinet minister who spent twenty five years and a fortune building a manor on the spine of the peninsula, then shot himself in a committee room at Parliament in 1898. The house went on to be an asylum, a hospital for shell shocked soldiers and a nuns' retreat before a family bought the wreck of it in 1967 and spent decades putting it back. The gardens are as good as the interior and the view runs down both sides of the peninsula at once.

At the far end is Taiaroa Head, and the reason to come. Northern royal albatross nest on the headland: birds with a three metre wingspan that spend years at sea without touching land, breeding here in a colony that has been protected since the 1930s and is the only mainland nesting site of any albatross species in the world. The observatory is on a guided tour, timed, and worth booking.

Under the same headland is a coastal fort. The Armstrong disappearing gun was installed in 1889, when New Zealand was worried about the Russian navy, and it is still in its original pit: a six inch gun that rises to fire, recoils back below the parapet to be reloaded, and is one of very few left anywhere in working order. The tour goes down into the magazines and tunnels.

Baldwin Street is a residential street in a suburb three kilometres north of the centre which reaches a gradient of 34.8 per cent, and has held the world record for the steepest street for most of the last thirty years. A Welsh village briefly took the title and Dunedin got it back after a measurement argument that the city took extremely seriously.

It looks like an optical illusion from the bottom and it is not. The walk up takes about ten minutes, the surface is concrete rather than tarmac because asphalt would flow downhill in summer, and there is a drinking fountain at the top. Coming down is harder than going up. Every July somebody rolls ten thousand chocolates down it for charity.

Then finish in the botanic garden, which is a kilometre back towards town and was the first in New Zealand, laid out in 1863. It runs up a hillside in thirty hectares with a rhododendron dell that is the reason people come in October, an aviary of native birds, and an upper garden of native bush you can be alone in on a weekday.

That leaves you twenty minutes from the centre and half an hour from the airport.