Nau mai, haere mai. Central Otago and the Southern Lakes are New Zealand’s mountain interior — deep glacial lakes, schist and thyme-covered hills, four true seasons, and some of the most dramatic landscape in the country. It is also the hardest place in this collection to move to, and we are going to be direct about why.
The most beautiful, most difficult option
This guide covers two adjoining districts that function as one region: Queenstown Lakes — Queenstown, Wānaka, Arrowtown, Hāwea — and Central Otago proper, the drier inland basins around Cromwell, Alexandra, Clyde and the Maniototo. Together they hold around sixty-five thousand people in an area the size of a small country, ringed by mountains.
Two facts define life here for a clinician. The first is that there is no base hospital. Care is delivered through small rural hospitals and a strong community and primary network, and anything complex travels — three hours by road to Dunedin, or by air. This is rural and remote medicine, and it is a different job.
The second is the housing market. Queenstown and Wānaka are the least affordable places to live in New Zealand relative to local incomes — worse than Auckland — and rentals are scarce and seasonal. Clinicians make this region work, but they do it deliberately, often by living further inland.
What you get in return is not in dispute. Four ski fields inside an hour. Lakes you swim in. Autumn that stops people in the street. Direct flights to Australia from a town of twenty-eight thousand. And a kind of clinical work — broad, autonomous, mountain-and-adventure-flavoured — that exists almost nowhere else.
- Ethicare is a healthcare recruitment company. This guide is free to read, asks nothing of you, and does not give visa advice.
- This is the region we talk the most people out of. Not because it isn’t wonderful, but because a holiday here and a life here are different things. Where we think it’s the wrong answer, we say so.
The region, in nine numbers
Six things you only learn once you’re here
- This is the rohe of Kāi Tahu. Lake Wakatipu is Whakatipu-wai-māori, and the trails through these mountains were pounamu routes long before the gold. The 1860s rush is the layer most visible today — the stone cottages of Arrowtown, Clyde and Naseby, and the Chinese miners’ settlement at Arrowtown.
- You’re not expected to arrive fluent in te reo. You are expected to try. Te ao Māori at work covers pronunciation and the words you’ll hear on the ward.
How to read this guide
Nine chapters, all of them about Central Otago and the Southern Lakes specifically. Anything true of New Zealand generally — visas, registration, tax, renting law, driving licences, schools — lives once in Moving to New Zealand.
If you read nothing else, read Healthcare here, because the absence of a base hospital changes everything about the job, and Cost of living, because it is the reason most people who want this region cannot have it.