$10.99City Highlights
Auckland Audio Walking Tours
Self-guided, narrated walks through Auckland. Buy a tour once, download it, and hear the story at each stop while you walk at your own pace.
Tours from $8.99
Friends walk free. One purchase covers everyone on your walk. Start the tour, invite your friends to join, and it plays on every phone in your group.
5.0 on Google Play
Auckland audio tours
Each tour is a mapped route with narration at every stop. Buy it once and it is yours to keep, no subscription.
$10.99City Highlights
$8.99City HighlightsWhat to expect on a Auckland audio walking tour
Auckland's two audio walks pull you away from the car heavy isthmus and onto the water that actually built this city, one crossing by ferry to a seaside volcano village, the other tracing the downtown wharves where the City of Sails earned its name.
The Devonport Walk starts at the ferry wharf across the harbor from downtown, climbs Mount Victoria for the best view of the city, calls in at the volunteer run Devonport Museum inside an old transplanted church, then climbs North Head, a volcano honeycombed with gun tunnels from an 1880s war scare, before finishing at the Torpedo Bay Navy Museum on the beach. It's about 4.3 kilometers and 64 minutes, with two short, honest climbs built in.
The Waterfront Walk begins at Britomart, the restored warehouse quarter around the city's main station, and follows the wharves west past Queens Wharf, once the busiest working dock in the city, to the New Zealand Maritime Museum, where the America's Cup winning yacht Black Magic hangs in its own gallery.
From there the route circles Viaduct Harbour, the marina built for the America's Cup defense, crosses the lifting Wynyard Crossing bridge, and finishes among the fishing boats and seafood restaurants of North Wharf. It's a flat 2.6 kilometers and about 40 minutes, almost entirely free of cars.
Where to walk in Auckland
A few of the stops you will pass, and why they are worth slowing down for.
Rangitoto and the Harbour
Rangitoto rises low and even across the water, the youngest volcano in the Auckland field and one born from the sea only about six hundred years ago. A small boat crosses the frame here, a reminder that this walk is reached by a short harbor crossing from downtown Auckland rather than by road. The rocky foreground is part of the seawall lining Devonport's shore, built up with volcanic stone much like the hill you're about to climb. On a clear day Rangitoto's silhouette is the one constant view from almost every high point on this route, whether you're standing on Mount Victoria or North Head.
Bean Rock Lighthouse
Bean Rock Lighthouse stands on its own spindly legs out in the Waitematā Harbour, one of the oldest surviving lighthouses of its kind in New Zealand and still a working aid to navigation. Its wooden keeper's house, perched high above the water on a timber frame, marks a shallow patch that has caught out sailors since Auckland's earliest trading days. The moody grey sky and choppy water here are a fair sample of how quickly Auckland's weather can turn, since a bright morning can cloud over within the hour. It sits roughly between Devonport and the city, visible from several points along the Devonport Walk's hills.
The Harbour Bridge
The Auckland Harbour Bridge arches low across the Waitematā in the last gold light of the day, linking the city to the North Shore since it opened in 1959. Before the bridge, ferries including vehicle ferries from Devonport were the only real link between the two shores, and the crossing you make at the start of the Devonport Walk is a direct descendant of that older way of getting around. Small yachts drift near the shore in the foreground, a reminder that Auckland earns its nickname, the City of Sails, every single afternoon. The Sky Tower and downtown skyline rise just beyond the bridge's far end.
Queens Wharf and the Ferry Building
Boats crowd the water in front of the Ferry Building, the handsome brick and sandstone terminal from 1912 where ferries still leave for Devonport, Waiheke Island and the harbour's other shores. Behind it rise the glass towers of downtown Auckland, cranes marking a city that's always mid construction. This stretch of waterfront was the city's busiest working harbour for most of the twentieth century, lined with cargo sheds unloading frozen lamb and butter bound for Britain. Only Shed 10 survives from that era now, repurposed as a cruise terminal nearby.
Devonport's Beachfront
Waves roll gently onto a stretch of sand across the road from a row of beach houses and cafes, the kind of quietly good looking coastline that makes Devonport feel like its own seaside town rather than a suburb of a major city. A city bus idles at the curb, the easy alternative if you'd rather not take the ferry back. Weatherboard houses step up the hill behind the beach, many of them well over a century old. This is the easy, unhurried side of Devonport, the flat coastal stretch that balances out the two volcanic climbs elsewhere on the walk.
Get the Audio Tour in 3 Simple Steps
All in the free Walk With Me app, and the first stops of every tour are free to try.
Tap the Gold Headphones and Pick a Tour
01
Walk It Solo or Invite Someone
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Press Play and Walk
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Handcrafted for Your Time in the City
These tours aren't a checklist of sights. They're made to be walked slowly, headphones on, eyes on the city.
Meditative and Immersive
Each story is told where it happened. The app chimes when you reach a stop, one tap starts the story, and the stretch between stops is yours to take in at your own pace.
Handcrafted With Care
We choose every route and every stop ourselves and shape each story with care, so the time you have in the city goes to the places most worth seeing.
Better With Someone
Every walk is better with someone beside you, so if you can bring a friend, we really hope you do. That's why one purchase covers everyone you invite: they join your tour free.