A proposal to drop a wood-fired floating sauna onto a small spring-fed lake at the southern edge of Te Anau has been knocked back by the Southland District Council after locals turned out in force to defend one of the town’s last uncommercialised public spaces.
Floating Sauna Limited had applied to run a wood-fired sauna with a daily capacity of around 160 people on Lake Henry, the roughly 230 metre wide pond that sits tucked inside the 35 hectare Ivon Wilson Park about four kilometres south of the township. The lake was once joined to Lake Te Anau and broke away as the great glaciers of the last ice age retreated some 14,000 years ago. In more recent decades it served as a trout hatchery, and it is now formally designated as a children’s fishery.
Of the 210 submissions councillors received on the licence application, 170 opposed the sauna and just 37 supported it, according to RNZ. At Wednesday’s hearing in the council chamber, every councillor who voted came down against the proposal, sending Floating Sauna Limited away empty handed.
Resident Diana Zadravec, who helped marshal much of the local opposition, told the meeting that the township already had very few public places left where people could meet, swim, fish or simply sit without being charged or marketed at. “We really appreciate to have one space in town that is not commercialised,” she said.
Councillor Matt Wilson, who knows Lake Henry well, pointed out during the debate that the water body was already shared between three public platforms used for swimming and fishing, and that adding a private sauna pontoon would tip the balance away from public use. “Lake Henry is only this big. There’s three public platforms and one out… would be commercialised,” he told the chamber.
The application had been working its way through the planning system since 2024 and had cleared its resource consent hurdle in February of this year. The final step, and the one that ultimately killed the project, was the council-issued licence to actually occupy the lake bed. Without that licence, the resource consent alone is of no use to the applicant.
The reasons given for the unanimous decline ran along three main lines. The first was environmental. A wood-fired heater on a small enclosed body of water raised obvious concerns about smoke discharge over the surrounding bush, the surface of the lake and the lungs of swimmers, anglers and picnickers using the park on the same day. The second was the question of commercial creep into reserve land that has, for decades, been treated as a community asset. The third was the simple matter of scale. Lake Henry is small, with a diameter not much greater than the length of a rugby field, and the proposed sauna would have sat in plain view from every existing platform on the water.
For Te Anau, which sits at the gateway to Fiordland National Park and lives off the same tourism economy that fills Milford Sound boats and the Kepler and Routeburn tracks, the decision lands as a small but pointed statement about where the line should sit. The township was first surveyed in 1893, expanded sharply after the Homer Tunnel opened the road to Milford in 1953, and has spent the past half century balancing a resident population of a few thousand against millions of visitors passing through. Ivon Wilson Park, with its mix of native and introduced trees, walking tracks and views to the Fiordland ranges, has long been one of the spaces locals point to when asked where they go to escape the visitor flow.
Floating saunas are a relatively recent arrival in New Zealand, riding the same wave of Nordic style bathing culture that has popped up in coastal spots from Wellington’s south coast to Akaroa, Wānaka and the Coromandel. Most operate from jetties or barges in saltwater harbours where smoke disperses easily and water bodies are large enough that a single operation barely registers. Lake Henry, by contrast, is more akin to a large farm dam, fed by springs and surrounded by walking tracks, which made the fit always look awkward to the people who use the park every week.
Diana Zadravec and the other objectors stopped short of attacking the wider sauna trend. The message instead, picked up by several councillors during questions, was that the right place for a commercial sauna in the Te Anau area is on Lake Te Anau itself, where there is far more water, far more existing commercial activity and far fewer young anglers using the shore as a learning ground. The applicants will now have to decide whether to scout for an alternative site or shelve the idea entirely.
For now, the three small wooden platforms on Lake Henry remain exactly as they were. Children will keep arriving with their borrowed rods to fish for the rainbow trout the lake is stocked with, swimmers will keep using the timber jetties in summer, and the spring-fed water that has sat in this corner of Fiordland for fourteen thousand years will not, after all, have a wood smoke plume rising from its surface.
It is a small win in a small town, but it is the kind of small win that quietly defines what kind of place Te Anau wants to be as the visitor numbers keep climbing.
What do you think? Should small lakes like Lake Henry stay completely free of commercial operators, or is there a sensible middle ground? Have your say in the comments below.
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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