The Cardrona Hotel: Creating a New Zealand heritage icon

On the road between the famed tourist hubs of Wanaka and Arrowtown on New Zealand’s South Island lies the former 1860s gold-rush-era town of Cardrona. There, beside an immaculately kept heritage precinct of nineteenth-century wooden buildings, tourists pause at the Cardrona Hotel, an architectural relic of the rush for gold in Central Otago. This hotel has emerged in guidebooks and local histories, and on social media sites and ratings guides, as a tourism and craft beer ‘must-do’ and, according to Heritage New Zealand, has become New Zealand’s most photographed hotel. Its popularity defies belief and even logic, and yet each new visitor to the region appears determined to leave with at least one photograph of its distinctive facade in their portfolio. The story behind the survival of the heritage-listed structure and its elevation to the heights of popular and tourist culture ‘icon’ status stems from a combination of its remote location, the enduring romanticization of the gold rush, a succession of eccentric owners, the mythopoeia of a popular book from the 1950s and its inclusion in a brewer’s marketing campaign. Each has scaffolded the Cardrona Hotel to become iconic to the gold-rush era, heritage tourism and New Zealand’s popular culture and identity.