Opening hours, prices and tickets for places worth your time.
City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi is the city's public gallery for contemporary art, on Te Ngākau Civic Square. Since 1993 it has occupied the former Wellington Central Library, an Art Deco building of 1940, where it shows changing exhibitions by New Zealand and international artists. It reopened in October 2026 after a closure for building work.
Wellington Museum occupies the 1892 Bond Store on Queens Wharf, a former harbour board warehouse designed by Frederick de Jersey Clere. Four floors tell the region's story: Māori creation stories shown with theatrical illusions, maritime galleries with a captain's cabin, a theatre on the 1968 Wahine ferry disaster, and the attic exhibition.
The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is the national museum and art gallery, opened in 1998 on the Wellington waterfront. Its exhibitions cover Māori and Pacific taonga, natural history including a colossal squid, and New Zealand art, and the building holds a modern marae, Rongomaraeroa, with a carved wharenui.
The Wellington Cable Car is a funicular railway, opened in 1902, that climbs 120 metres over about 600 metres from Lambton Quay in the city centre to Kelburn. Two red cars pass halfway on the five-minute ride; at the top are a lookout over the harbour, the Cable Car Museum and an entrance to the Botanic Garden.
Space Place is a public observatory and planetarium in the Carter Observatory building, opened in 1941 at the top of the Wellington Botanic Garden near the Cable Car terminus. It has a digital full-dome planetarium, galleries on space and on how Māori navigated by the stars, and the historic Thomas Cooke refractor telescope used on evening visits.
Wellington Botanic Garden ki Paekākā covers 25 hectares of a valley between Thorndon and Kelburn and was established in 1868 on land where Ngāti Te Whiti of Te Āti Awa once grew food. Paths lead through protected native forest, conifers, the Lady Norwood Rose Garden and the duck pond; the top of the Cable Car is one of its entrances.
The New Zealand Parliament Buildings stand at the northern end of Lambton Quay: the Gothic Revival Parliamentary Library of 1899, the neoclassical Parliament House completed in 1922, and the circular executive wing known as the Beehive, opened in 1977. Visitors can walk the grounds, and guided tours start from the visitor centre in Parliament House.
The Wellington Cathedral of St Paul is the Anglican cathedral of the Diocese of Wellington, on Molesworth Street near Parliament. Designed by Cecil Wood in the 1930s, it was built in reinforced concrete between 1954 and 1998 because of the earthquake risk, and has been in use as the cathedral since 1964. It is a working church with daily services.
Old St Paul's is a timber Gothic Revival church in Thorndon, designed by the Reverend Frederick Thatcher and consecrated in 1866; it served as Wellington's Anglican pro-cathedral until 1964. Built from native timbers, it has curved rimu roof trusses and stained-glass windows, and is now cared for by Heritage New Zealand.
Mount Victoria, or Matairangi, is a 196-metre hill rising directly east of central Wellington, its slopes covered by the pine forest and walking tracks of the Town Belt. A road and paths lead to the summit lookout, which looks out over the city, Wellington Harbour, Evans Bay and the Miramar Peninsula, and holds a memorial to the polar explorer Richard E. Byrd.
Katherine Mansfield House & Garden is the two-storey wooden house on Tinakori Road in Thorndon where the writer Katherine Mansfield was born in October 1888, shortly after her family moved in. The restored rooms show a colonial family home of the period, with changing exhibitions on her life and work and a heritage garden.
Zealandia is a 225-hectare forest valley in Karori, ringed since 1999 by a predator-proof fence, where native wildlife is being restored a few minutes from central Wellington. Walking tracks lead past the old Karori reservoirs and their Victorian valve tower; visitors see tūī, kākā and tuatara, and kiwi on night tours.
Wellington Zoo opened in 1906 in Newtown and is the oldest public zoo in New Zealand, covering 13 hectares of hillside in the city's green belt. Visitors see giraffes, lions, meerkats and lemurs alongside native species, and can watch vets at work in The Nest Te Kōhanga, the zoo's animal hospital.
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