Te Anau Lake

Why it matters

Three hundred and forty-four square kilometres, sixty-five kilometres long, and over four hundred metres deep — sources put the deepest point at 417 or 425 metres and we would not print either without saying whose it is. It sits at about 210 metres above the sea, and because it feeds the Manapōuri power scheme it is a managed lake as well as a wild one: its operating range is held within a metre or so, which is a different number from its elevation and the two get mixed up constantly.

The three arms reaching west into the mountains are called North Fiord, Middle Fiord and South Fiord, and they are the only features in New Zealand that actually carry the word fiord in their names. Every coastal fiord in the country — Milford, Doubtful, Dusky, all of them — is called a Sound, which is the wrong word for a glacial trench and stuck anyway. So the only things officially named fiord in New Zealand are these, and they are fresh water, eighty kilometres inland.

And the name itself runs backwards from what everyone assumes. Te Ana-au means the cave of swirling water, and the lake and the town are named after the caves on the western shore, not the caves after the lake. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that reading was disputed — there was a competing account tying the name to a Waitaha chief's granddaughter — and it only settled when someone found the cave the name was describing.

What it's like

The lake is doing two different things at once and the town sits at the join. Look east and south and it is a normal large lake with a shoreline, a marina, a rodeo ground and gorse. Look west and it stops being scenery and becomes a boundary: Mount Luxmore and the Kepler range, then the Murchison Mountains behind them, rising fourteen hundred metres out of the water with the three fiords cutting back between them into country nobody lives in.

What makes the evening walk work is that the sun goes down behind exactly that. There is nothing on the far shore to light up — no road, no farm, no township, no headlights working their way along a lakeside — so as the light goes the western side simply becomes a silhouette and then a darkness, and the lake holds the last of the sky for a surprisingly long time afterwards. It is the emptiest view available from a footpath in New Zealand, and it is forty minutes from the visitor centre on the flat.

The other thing worth knowing is what the far side has been hiding. In November 1948 a Dunedin doctor named Geoffrey Orbell, working on a hunch and a set of old reports, walked into a valley in the Murchison Mountains above this lake and found a bird that had been formally declared extinct twice, in 1850 and again in 1898. He heard, in his words, an unfamiliar call, deep and long, and then found fresh tracks in sand. The takahē had been surviving in a fold of country that no road reached, and a special area of five hundred square kilometres was closed around it almost immediately. There are around five hundred of the birds now, up from a low of about half that after a stoat plague in 2007 — still Nationally Vulnerable, and still, for the wild population, essentially here.

How to visit

All of it starts on foot from the town, and the two walks that matter both begin at the Fiordland National Park Visitor Centre on the lakefront.

The lakefront walk runs south from the visitor centre to the Rodeo Grounds, about forty minutes, flat, sealed, dog-friendly and lit at the town end. This is the dusk walk, and it is the one thing in Fiordland that costs nothing and takes no arranging.

The control gates walk goes the other way — fifty minutes, graded Easy, past the bird sanctuary and along the shore to the gates themselves, with Dock Bay and its toilets five minutes further on. It is cycle-friendly. The gates are also the start of the Kepler Track, so this short walk is the first two kilometres of a Great Walk, and the reason the Kepler is the one you can begin on foot from a café.

The gates themselves are more interesting than they look: they regulate the flow between Lake Te Anau and Lake Manapōuri, which is to say they are part of the plumbing of the Manapōuri power scheme — the same scheme whose proposal to raise these lakes produced the biggest conservation campaign in the country's history. Doubtful Sound carries that story.

One housekeeping note that applies to the whole lake: didymo is present here, and in Lake Manapōuri and the Waiau River. If your boots, boat or fishing gear have been in fresh water anywhere else in New Zealand, Check, Clean, Dry them.

Making the most of it

Do the lakefront at dusk on your first evening, not your last. It orientates the whole trip: once you have seen how much emptiness starts on the far shore, the drives and the fiords stop being separate attractions and start being edges of the same roadless block. It also costs nothing, which after a few days in Fiordland is worth something on its own.

Get on the water if you can. The western shore is only reachable by boat, and the two easy ways across both do something else as well — the glowworm caves cruise lands you at the cave the lake is named after, and the Brod Bay water taxi, about fifteen minutes and taking up to fifteen people, drops you at the foot of the Kepler's big climb. Either one gets you the view back at the town from the middle of the lake, which is the only angle from which you understand how small it is against what it sits beside.

The Lake2Lake Trail is 28.5 kilometres of Grade 2 gravel running from the visitor centre down to Manapōuri, and it is a good ride with an important caveat: it is not continuous. The leg between Balloon Loop and Supply Bay Road is still awaiting DOC approval for construction with no date attached, so riders currently join the highway for about four kilometres. A trail sold as lake-to-lake is not quite lake-to-lake yet.

And the fishing is genuinely good rather than politely mentioned — this is one of Southland's most heavily used lake fisheries, brown and rainbow trout, licence required, with two competitions run over Labour Weekend.

A note on the town itself, because published figures for it vary wildly and most of the variation is an artefact. About 2,900 people live in the Te Anau urban area (Statistics New Zealand estimate, June 2025); it was 2,538 at the 2018 census. Much lower figures you will see are counting a rural statistical area, which is a different place. It is a small town that handles a very large number of visitors.

Nearby

Everything is Te Anau, because the lake and the town are the same subject seen from two directions — the town exists where it does because this is where the lake lets you in.

From here the two fiords are day trips in opposite directions: Milford Sound two hours north up the Milford Road, and Doubtful Sound a longer day south through Manapōuri. The glowworm caves on the western shore and the Kepler Track from the control gates both start at this lake.