Mount Maunganui will be closed to walkers for up to another four months while restoration crews repair the slopes that gave way in January. Work began on the maunga — known to mana whenua as Mauao — on Monday morning, the first sustained effort to make the mountain safe to reopen since it was shut to the public on 22 January after a landslide off its slopes onto the Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park took six lives during a long burst of heavy rainfall.
Tauranga City Council, the Mauao Trust and the mana whenua partnership Ngā Poutiriao o Mauao are running the project together. Mayor Mahé Drysdale attended a blessing on the maunga before the crews started work. “The blessing represented an important moment of rest and respect as work begun on the maunga,” he said in a statement released to RNZ. The mayor said the timing of any reopening would depend heavily on autumn and winter weather, and that the council would put out regular updates as the work progressed.
The current estimate is that the restoration could take up to four months. That is a window rather than a deadline. A wet stretch through May and June will slow stabilisation work on the loose ground, and a dry run will move it along faster. The team has been clear that the goal is not to hit a date — it is to get the maunga to a state where it is genuinely safe to reopen, and where what happened in January cannot easily happen again.
Mauao is one of those places that does not really have an equivalent elsewhere in the country. The 232-metre headland sits at the northern tip of the Mount Maunganui peninsula, with the harbour entrance on one side and the open Pacific on the other, and its silhouette is the visual shorthand for the entire Bay of Plenty. The name itself carries a story. In one Tauranga Moana tradition, Mauao was the smaller hill that fell in love with another hill, was rejected, and asked the patupaiarehe — the supernatural beings of the night — to drag it into the sea so it could disappear. The patupaiarehe began to haul it toward the harbour in the dark, but the dawn rose before they could finish, and the hill was left where the sun caught it. Mauao means caught by the dawn.
For Tauranga residents, the closure has been the longest the maunga has been off-limits in living memory. The summit track and the base track between them carry hundreds of thousands of visits a year. Many local runners and walkers measure their week by how many laps they have done on it. A school group from Mount Maunganui College or Tauranga Boys’ will summit it on a regular morning. Tour buses stop at its foot. The empty summit track since January has been one of the quiet absences in the city’s daily rhythm.
The restoration itself is a slow, ground-level kind of work. Crews are stabilising the slopes that gave way in the January storm, regrading paths where they have eroded under both rainfall and the volume of foot traffic, and replanting in places where vegetation is needed to hold the soil. None of this is glamorous. Helicopter slings of materials, hand-spread mulch, a lot of careful inspection by geotechnical engineers, and the slow work of letting native plantings take root. Several previous restoration cycles on Mauao have done variants of the same job over the past two decades, but this is the most significant since the maunga began carrying its current visitor numbers.
The partnership between the council and Ngā Poutiriao o Mauao matters here. Mauao is not just a council asset. It was returned to its mana whenua iwi — Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui and Ngāti Pūkenga — through a Treaty settlement, and the day-to-day stewardship is now run jointly with the council under co-governance arrangements. That structure has shaped how this restoration is being approached. Cultural protocols govern the early-morning blessing, the timing of work, and the way the maunga is spoken about in public communications. The council frames Mauao as a taonga rather than as a piece of municipal land, and the language tracks the legal reality.
For visitors planning a Bay of Plenty trip in the next few months, the practical answer is to assume the summit and base tracks will remain closed until at least early spring. The wider Mount Maunganui beach, the main beach walk, the surf, and the cafes and shops along the foreshore are all open and operating normally. The closure is the maunga itself, and the surrounding streets and waterfront have continued to function in the meantime.
What the city is waiting for, beyond the technical reopening, is the moment the first walkers reach the summit again. That moment, when it happens, will not be small.
If you have walked Mauao many times over the years, drop a comment below and tell us what the maunga means to you.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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