Dunedin
To quote Mark Twain in his book ‘’Journeys across the Equator,” when describing New Zealand and Dunedin, “When the Scottish settled in Dunedin they thought they had found heaven, and indeed they have.”
There is no mistaking the ancestry of Dunedin’s founding fathers: certainly not with a statue of Robert Burns in the Octagon, the heart of the city, where the wailing notes of the bagpipes are heard most evenings. The name Dunedin or Dun-edin, is the old Gaelic name for Edinburgh.
Dunedin’s future was assured after gold was discovered in 1859-62 in Central Otago, although 75 miles inland it was the nearest port and almost overnight it went from being a Scottish Church settlement, to a booming gold-rush banking and supply town with a population leap from 2,000 in 1861 to 10,000 in 1865. It developed into New Zealand’s wealthiest city; today that heritage can be seen in the Edwardian architecture, the public buildings of which the railway station finished in 1904 is I think the most magnificent and probably the most photograph building in the country.
Today many of us had the opportunity to visit some of the heritage left by the city’s early wealth, visiting the botanic gardens (being proudly described as New Zealand’s first) the Otago Museum, ‘Olverston’; a Jacobean-style mansion built in 1906 by the Theomin family and gifted to the city by his daughter in 1966, complete with its collection of early New Zealand art, Japanese & Chinese jade, Persian carpets, French furniture, Japanese weaponry and English silver.
Even with all this heritage, if you were to ask someone from the city what the most important feature of the town is, they would without hesitation tell you; Baldwin ST; The steepest street in the world with a gradient of 1 in 2.7 according to The Guinness Book of Records.
