Otatara Pa Historic Reserve Walk, Waiohiki, Other

Otatara Pa

Other Walks

One of the largest and most ancient Maori pa sites in the Hawke's Bay, now a reserve managed by DOC. The reserve includes a loop walking track which takes about an hour.
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A Major hill pa complex

In the Taradale Hills on the outskirts of modern ‘Art Deco’ Napier lie the remains of a much earlier settlement. Twentieth-century quarrying largely destroyed one of the two pa now covered by the name ‘Otatara’ but, even so, its 33 hectares at Springfield Road, just outside Napier, form one of the most impressive archaeological sites in New Zealand and have been compared to One Tree Hill in Auckland. It is certainly the largest and the oldest in Hawke’s Bay and once may have covered almost 50 hectares. The small ditch and bank defences point to its antiquity and it is thought that Otatara may have been settled between 1400 and 1500. As you will appreciate on a clear day, Otatara commanded good views of rich kumara gardens, fishing, fowling and flax and raupo resources in the swamps and the then-navigable Tutaekuri River. A rich and often conflicting welter of stories associated with the place and its factionalised later dominant iwi nevertheless attest to its significance for commemorating the conquest of Heretaunga by Ngati Kahungunu from Poverty Bay about 1550 under Taraia. Actually, the name Otatara originally belonged to the lower pa. Now mostly quarried away, this pa occupied an isolated ridge cut on one side by the Tutaekuri River to form a natural defensive cliff. What you see now is the larger and higher of the two, Hikurangi (‘the cloud piercer’), about 500 metres further up the ridge. On the way up you can see house terraces and regularly spaced deep pits that once stored kumara in roofed-over pits. Hikurangi lacks ditch and bank defences but there is evidence of defensive scarping. Permanent occupation probably ceased about 1820 after northern raiders struck elsewhere in the district during the Musket Wars. Donald McLean bought the Ahuriri Block for the Crown in 1851. The Dolbel family owned Otatara and much of the surrounding land for over a century. It has been an historic reserve since 1972 and remains important to those local Maori who ‘live in the shadow of Otatara’.

© 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.

Further reading: Elizabeth Pishief, Kevin Jones and Waiohiki Marae, Assessment of Heritage Significance, Otatara Pa Historic Reserve, DOC, Napier, 1997

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