Napier is a detour when you’re doing a quick round of the North Island, but it was one of the places I was most eager to see on my New Zealand trip. On my approach from Rotorua, I even passed a sign “next gas station 130km”, which speaks of Napier’s remoteness. But the road that followed was very scenic. And at the end, there is this still busy port and bustling town with low-rise buildings. It has 66,000 inhabitants.

Parking is a bit of a headache, as almost every spot has to be paid for and they usually allow only 2 hours. But I was booked on the Guided Walk of Napier’s Art Deco Trust, which alone would last 2 hours. In the end I found out that parking was free after 2 pm on a Saturday, so I only had to pay a bit and could leave my car for the rest of the day.

We were a group of about 15 on the guided walk, led by two ladies of a certain age. First, we watched a presentation inside the lovely building of the Art Deco Trust, and afterwards, we walked a fair bit around town. The presentation gave us some background info on why Napier looks like it does nowadays. The city was struck by a strong earthquake in 1931, which not only resulted in the flattening of almost the entire city center (and ca. 260 deaths) but also lifted the land by 2 metres. The surrounding area used to be a lagoon and is now flat land, used for an airport for example. Most people, however, now and then, lived on the hills and their houses came out of it unscathed.

The center of Napier was rebuilt very quickly, in about 2 years, since it was an important seaport for shipping wool and meat. In the process, they widened the streets and used building styles that were en vogue in the 1930s: the Spanish Mission style, Prairie style, Stripped Classicism and Art Deco. Its existence alone is remarkable: in the 1930s, nobody built new constructions, because globally there was no money because of the financial crisis.

Napier has some 160 heritage buildings, and that is a lot. We only saw a selection of those on the tour; I wandered around by myself for an hour beforehand and saw some more, but still it will take you a couple of hours to see most of them. The streets of Napier are further adorned with palm trees, mostly imported from the USA in the 1920s. The bright colouring of the buildings is from a later date – when they were built in the 1930s they were all grey.

The strength of Napier lies in its ensemble and mixture of 1930s styles, with some Maori ornamentation thrown in for local flavour. Some seem like cheaper versions of Frank Lloyd Wright’s works. Generally, mostly the facades are in the traditional styles: the shops below are modern and house cheap stores and Indian restaurants. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to enter anywhere, although we had a quick look inside a shoe store where they recently recovered the original ceiling.

The self-assessment referenced by Carlo in his review is more like a self-critique. Yes, there are some newer buildings in prominent positions in the city center, but you will not find a perfect town frozen in time anywhere. From me, Napier gets a thumbs-up and I hope to see it again on the new New Zealand Tentative List next year.