Otago highlights
Fog at Lindis Pass, Central Otago
Otago is a conservation treasure chest, with half a million hectares of public conservation land in this diverse province.
With a 300-kilometre coastline and conservation parks such as Catlins on the coast and Te Papanui and many other conservation areas throughout Otago it's a 'Remarkable' conservancy. Its largest area is Mount Aspiring National Park, named after a mountain that's an ice-encrusted beacon in the landscape.
Otago has everything: rock, boulder, ice, snow, forest, lakes, rivers, climatic and scenic extremes and examples of its past - especially in the 21-site Otago Goldfields Park.
The conservancy maintains numerous tracks and facilities and half the Routeburn Track, one of DOC's Great Walks. Other tracks include the Rees-Dart, the Greenstone-Caples and Gillespie Pass circuits.There's also the incredibly popular, 150-kilometre Otago Central Rail Trail for cyclists, walkers and, in some sections, those who want to travel it on horseback.
Otago has some 230 threatened plants: rare tree daisies, especially Olearia Hectorii; the cress, Cook's scurvy grass; a shrub, leonohebe cupressoides; a small tree, Pittosporum patulum, grasses like Simplicia laxa and a wonderful range of spring annuals and minute herbs.
Of threatened fauna, DOC's Grand and Otago skink recovery programme is based among the rock tors of Macraes Flat. The world's only mainland population of northern royal albatross is at Taiaroa Head on the Otago Peninsula and nearby, a breeding population of the New Zealand sea lion.
There are mohua or yellowhead in South Otago and at the head of both lakes Wakatipu and Wanaka. Islands on both those lakes shelter recently returned populations of Buff weka, extinct on the mainland since 1920.