The long empty site where the Waiwera hot pools once stood has cleared its biggest hurdle, with the developers announcing on Tuesday that Auckland Council has granted resource consent for a $58 million bathing and wellness complex on the Hibiscus Coast.
Waiwera Thermal Springs Property Limited said in a statement released through Scoop that developed designs are finished, construction is planned to begin in early 2027 and the doors are expected to open by the middle of 2028. That would be a decade after the old resort closed and five years after the bulldozers arrived.
The company describes a layered landscape of 29 pools across a range of temperatures, alongside saunas, cold plunge, a mist walk, a stone walk, bathing trails through native bush, spa treatments, a cafe and a restaurant. When the plans were first shown to the public in November last year the count was 28 pools. The 1.7 hectare site sits about 40 kilometres north of central Auckland and the design is by Studio Pacific Architecture.
The earlier Waiwera was built around hydroslides and family play. This one keeps a family area but adds adult only zones, which the company frames as a shift from water park to bathing sanctuary.
“Achieving Resource Consent and reaching the detailed design stage of this project are significant milestones and we are absolutely delighted,” said Brandon Batagol, joint managing director of Waiwera Thermal Springs.
His fellow joint managing director Craig Mitchell said the focus now moves to money. “With Resource Consent secured, our focus now turns to securing the final portion of private investment required, along with completing the detailed design,” Mitchell said. “From there we’ll commence construction, keeping the community closely informed throughout the process. This is a carefully considered restoration of a place that matters to Aucklanders and of the relationship between people and the water that has drawn them here for generations.”
An independent economic assessment by BDO, commissioned by the developers, found the complex could draw more than 310,000 visitors a year, support around 90 direct and indirect jobs and add up to $300 million in gross regional product over its first seven years. Those are the developer’s numbers rather than the council’s, and they sit close to what the old resort managed at its peak.
Waiwera has been selling hot water for 150 years. Scottish settler Robert Graham bought the block from Ngāti Rongo in the mid 1840s and opened bathhouses and a hotel in 1875, and Aucklanders arrived by steamer. The site became one of the country’s best known water parks in the late twentieth century before it slid into neglect, closed in February 2018 and was demolished in 2023 after renovation plans stalled and the operating companies went into liquidation. Urban Partners has owned the land, and Waiwera Thermal Springs Property signed an agreement to buy it.
The most interesting thing about the past eight years, though, has happened underground rather than above it.
Waiwera’s hot springs originally surfaced on the beach, where people dug holes in the sand and lay in them. Heavy pumping through the 1960s and 1970s dropped the pressure in the aquifer so far that the water stopped rising on its own. A 2025 review of four decades of research on the field, published in the journal Advances in Geosciences by Michael Kühn and colleagues, records that the loss of pressure “led to the desiccation of the hot springs between 1975 and 1976”. A management plan adopted in 1987 capped how much water could be drawn, and the reservoir slowly recovered, but not enough to bring the beach springs back.
Then the resort shut. “Shortly after the primary user (Waiwera Thermal Resort & Spa) shut down its operation in 2018, locals reported overflowing boreholes to the Auckland Council,” the paper says. Thermal infrared surveys flown over the beach confirmed that the springs had started discharging again, and that they grew warmer between October 2019 and May 2022. The authors note that controlling the overflowing boreholes “may allow the coastal artesian springs to return to their historic recreational use”, and describe the shutdown as an almost unique natural experiment in how fast a damaged geothermal feature can heal.
Radiocarbon dating puts the water entering the reservoir at more than 20,000 years old. The developers put it at 22,000 years. Either way it is not a resource that refills quickly, which is why the council manages the field to keep the annual average water level in its monitoring bore above mean sea level.
That is the balance the new consent has to strike. When the application was lodged in December last year, the NZ Herald reported it sought up to 329,630 cubic metres of geothermal water a year, an average of 903 cubic metres a day, against an existing 2016 consent for 292,000 cubic metres. The developers said at the time that the aquifer had been studied in detail for 40 years and that the council’s management plan sets the sustainable limits. Tuesday’s announcement did not set out the volumes the council has finally allowed, and Newswire has not yet seen the decision itself.
The company has said Ngāti Manuhiri, for whom Waiwera holds ancestral significance, are involved as development partners. When the plans were unveiled last year, Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown gave them what he called his full backing, telling RNZ the site was “optimally placed along the tourist route, making the most of what we already have there”.
Consent is not the same as a spade in the ground. Mitchell’s own statement makes clear that a final tranche of private investment still has to be raised, and Waiwera has produced more announcements than buildings over the past decade, including a $250 million masterplan floated by the landowner in 2020 that never got off the drawing board. What has changed is that the paperwork is now done, the design is finished and the aquifer under the site is in better shape than it has been since the 1970s.
Did you swim at the old Waiwera pools, and would you go back to a quieter version of it? Tell us 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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