December 13, 2025 — 5:00am
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If Bondi Beach is Barbie, New Zealand’s Piha Beach is Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff. Brooding, wild, unpredictable.
Don’t turn up here with your colourful rashie, tiny bikini or striped cabana. A black T-shirt is what you need, or a long overcoat so you can hunch your back against the wind that slams the raging Tasman Sea onto jagged rocks.
Lion Rock, Piha Beach.Getty Images
While surfers love it year round and families flock to it in summer, Piha Beach, 50 minutes west of Auckland at the edge of the Waitakere Ranges, is more likely to be featured on an indie album cover than a jaunty ad for sunscreen, such is its coolness both in the water (winter temperatures are a wetsuit-wanting 14°C) and out of it (Neil Finn has a “bach” here and has been spotted braving the surf with fellow muso Eddie Vedder).
Make no mistake, this beach has attitude.
Perhaps it’s the black sand. Run a magnet along it and your hand will transform into a cone of dark fairy-floss thanks to the high iron content. On sun-baked days, this same sand-noir can singe any feet foolhardy enough to be bare.
Surf smashes against the rocks at Piha.Alamy
Or maybe it’s Lion Rock (Te Piha), the crouching king-of-the-jungle monolith which is actually the eroded neck of a volcano that looms over and divides Piha and North Piha beaches. Stairs will take you up this beast, which is decorated with Maori carvings and tributes to fallen Anzacs, but not to its summit, which is closed for safety reasons.
The beach and its arty namesake town, which tumbles down a hillside towards the black sand, is the dramatic finale to a five-hour adventure from Auckland with Bush and Beach Wilderness Experience Nature Tours.
Piha Beach near Auckland.Alamy
Earlier, our group – some Australians, a Singaporean, two Italians and a Texan couple – get to know each other as our small bus journeys through Auckland’s suburbs and out to the wild west of the Waitakere Ranges Regional Park with its rainforest, winding cliffs and rugged coastline. (The Texans are shocked at the high price of local “gas” and take innumerable pictures of bowsers along the way, while the Australians stay quiet when we are introduced to the authentic Kiwi meat pie.)
Mid-way we stop for panoramic views of Auckland’s two harbours at the Arataki Visitors Centre which also offers Maori carvings, a replica of the extinct, towering moa bird which once stamped around the area, and a walking trail through the rainforest, which we tackle with our expert guide and driver, Chris.
Maori carving outside the Arataki Visitors Centre.Alamy
As we pick our way past giant tree ferns, we learn how New Zealand’s famed silver fern can be used if you need to retrace your steps at night (leave a trail of fronds behind you, a la Hansel and Gretel, with the undersides face-up – they shine under moonlight) and how the kawakawa plant can be used topically to relieve eczema or brewed as tea to aid digestion – and if that does the job, its large, heart-shaped leaves have been dubbed the Kiwi camper’s toilet paper.
We’re also stopped in our tracks by the sheer enormity of the odd, ancient kauri tree. These giants of the forest almost went the way of the moa bird after being chopped down for sail masts in centuries past. Now they are part of a slow-growing but good news story. Much of this protected forest was once cleared for pasture. It’s now been left to regenerate, something it has been doing with gusto, albeit under careful management.
But back to Piha Beach. It’s overcast, and treacherous white-tops are delivering a belting as the wind propels us in different directions along the shore.
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Underfoot, tiny coiled white shells, Spirula spirula (a one-time home to the Ram’s horn squid) appear to glow on the dark sand, that seems full of intrigue to someone used to Sydney’s golden beaches. I stare at every bit of bleached driftwood or blob of translucent jellyfish, a dinosaur bone? A deep-sea treasure? And then another image appears – a piano key. Turns out that the haunting Jane Campion image of a lonely piano stranded on black sand was filmed just around the corner at Karekare Beach.
As we drift back towards our minibus for tea and Anzac biscuits (no disputing the shared ownership here), we turn again to the shore just as the sun sinks a little, casting a sliver of silver on the waves, and revealing something Aucklanders already know. Mysterious, wild, sometimes treacherous. Piha beach is all of that and something else – startlingly beautiful.
THE DETAILS
TOUR
The five-hour Bush and Beach Wilderness Experience Nature Tour from Auckland costs $NZ200 ($173), including afternoon tea. Guests are picked up and dropped off at their hotel. See bushandbeach.co.nz
STAY
Cordis Hotel, Auckland. 83 Symonds Street. From $NZ250 ($219) a night. See cordishotels.com
SO/Auckland 35 Hobson Street. From $NZ319 ($280) a night. See so-hotels.com/en/auckland
Abstract Hotel. 8 Upper Queen Street, Auckland. From $130 ($114). See abstracthotel.co.nz
The writer was a guest of Bush and Beach and Discover Auckland. See aucklandnz.com/au
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