Te Wahipounamu

Te Wahipounamu was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1990 and takes in some 26,000 km² of the south-west of New Zealand's South Island, around 10 % of the country's area. It is a serial property bringing together four national parks: Fiordland, Mount Aspiring, Westland Tai Poutini and Aoraki/Mount Cook.

Its name means in Māori the place of greenstone, in allusion to pounamu, or New Zealand jade, which is quarried in this region and carries enormous cultural value for Ngāi Tahu. The landscape was shaped by ice: deep fiords gouged well below sea level, U-shaped valleys, long narrow lakes, permanent snowfields and glaciers that in Westland descend almost into the temperate rainforest.

Its biological value comes from isolation. New Zealand separated from Gondwana some eighty million years ago and its flora and fauna evolved without land mammals: the forests of southern beech and podocarps are direct relicts of that supercontinent, and birds took the niches that elsewhere fall to mammals. Here survive the kea, the only alpine parrot in the world, the takahē, a flightless bird thought extinct until its rediscovery in 1948 in the Murchison Mountains of Fiordland, the Okarito kiwi and the Fiordland penguin, which nests in the coastal forest.