Christchurch

The green heart of the city is enormous. Hagley Park wraps around the Christchurch Botanic Gardens, 21 hectares of themed gardens, conservatories and specimen trees that began with a single English oak planted in 1863. The Avon River / Ōtākaro winds through it all, and the classic way to see it is from a flat-bottomed punt launched from the Antigua Boat Sheds: a thirty-minute glide beneath the willows while a punter in Edwardian dress points out the trees and birdlife. Listen to the audio guide first and you will know which oak is the founding one and why the Peace Bell is here.

A few minutes east of the square stands the city's most unlikely landmark. The Cardboard Cathedral, designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and opened in August 2013, was raised from 86 giant cardboard tubes on a base of shipping containers as a temporary stand-in for the ruined cathedral; it has since become permanent and still fills with worshippers. Around the corner on the south bank of the Avon, the Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial (Oi Manawa) carves the names of the 185 people killed into a long marble wall, with trees and seating on the opposite bank. Quake City, the compact museum nearby, fills in the rest with survivor interviews and salvaged fragments. Each stop has its own guide, so you can hear the sequence of events as you walk between them.

Worcester Boulevard runs from the square to the park, and the city's Victorian Gothic institutions line it. The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, once Canterbury College where Ernest Rutherford studied, is now a warren of galleries, cafés and cinemas in painstakingly restored stone. At the end of the boulevard the Canterbury Museum holds the skull of the extinct Haast's eagle and sledges from the Antarctic expeditions that sailed from here (its main building is mid-redevelopment, so part of the collection shows at 66 Gloucester Street until around 2029). Across the road, the glass curves of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū house the country's strongest collection of New Zealand art.

The rebuilt centre is best understood through its new gathering places. Riverside Market is the city's indoor food hall — fresh produce, bakers, bars and a dozen kitchens under one roof, with live music some evenings. New Regent Street, a pastel-coloured 1930s Spanish Mission row that survived the quakes, is where the heritage Christchurch Tram rattles through at walking pace; a day ticket lets you hop on and off around its 50-minute inner-city loop past the Bridge of Remembrance and the gardens.

The volcanic Port Hills rise directly behind the suburbs, and the Christchurch Gondola carries you from Heathcote Valley to a summit with 360-degree views over the city, the Canterbury Plains, the Southern Alps and Lyttelton Harbour. On the far side of the hills sits Lyttelton, the port town from which Scott and Shackleton sailed for Antarctica, now a village of cafés, galleries and a Saturday farmers' market. The Bridle Path, the route the first settlers walked over the hills in 1850, links the two and takes about an hour on foot.

An hour and a half south-east, Akaroa is a French-founded harbour village inside the drowned crater of Banks Peninsula, where harbour cruises go looking for Hector's dolphins, the world's smallest. Closer to home, the International Antarctic Centre beside the airport lets you ride a Hägglund tracked vehicle, sit through a simulated polar storm and watch little blue penguins being fed — a fitting introduction to a city that has served as the gateway to Antarctica for more than a century.

The centre is flat and walkable; most of the sights above sit inside a square kilometre. The tram, a Metro bus network and a generous cycle-lane grid cover the rest, and the gondola, Lyttelton and Sumner Beach are all within half an hour of the square.