Queenstown began as a gold rush settlement in the 1860s, prospectors drawn to the Shotover River, once considered so gold-rich it was nicknamed “the richest river in the world,” a boom that faded within decades as easily accessible gold ran out, leaving behind a small alpine town that might easily have quietly declined. Instead, Queenstown’s dramatic setting, on the shores of Lake Wakatipu and surrounded by the jagged Remarkables mountain range, eventually became its next great resource.
That transformation accelerated dramatically in 1988, when local businessman A.J. Hackett made the first commercial bungy jump from Auckland’s Greenhithe Bridge, before establishing the world’s first permanent commercial bungy operation at Queenstown’s Kawarau Gorge Bridge the following year, effectively inventing an entire global industry from a single, fairly reckless idea.
A Landscape That Doubled as a Film Set
The mountains and valleys surrounding Queenstown gained an entirely new layer of fame as key filming locations for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, their dramatic, largely untouched alpine scenery standing in for Middle-earth and drawing a new wave of visitors specifically seeking out locations from the films. Lake Wakatipu itself has a curious natural feature, a seiche, a rhythmic rise and fall of roughly 20 centimetres every 27 minutes, caused by wind and atmospheric pressure changes rather than any tidal influence.
Today Queenstown markets itself explicitly as the “Adventure Capital of the World,” its economy built substantially around skydiving, jet boating, skiing, and bungy jumping, activities that would have seemed entirely foreign to the gold prospectors who first settled the area.
Painting Alpine Water and Jagged Peaks
Lake Wakatipu’s still water against the Remarkables’ sharp mountain silhouette gives a watercolourist dramatic alpine contrast to work with. We’ve captured that setting in our own Queenstown Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of New Zealand for a wall at home.
Built first on gold and reinvented on adrenaline, Queenstown remains a small alpine town that has twice now turned its landscape into its entire economy.