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Te Matau-a-Māui

Welcome to Hawke’s Bay

Hawke’s Bay Guide · Chapter 1 of 9

Nau mai, haere mai ki Te Matau-a-Māui. Hawke’s Bay is a wide, sunlit crescent of coast on the east of the North Island — two cities twenty minutes apart, a fertile plain between them, hill country behind, and one of the great food and wine regions of the southern hemisphere.

The sunny east coast

Hawke’s Bay is shaped like a fish hook, which is what its Māori name describes. Napier sits on the northern arm of the bay, rebuilt in Art Deco after the 1931 earthquake and now holding one of the finest concentrations of that architecture anywhere in the world. Hastings lies twenty minutes inland across the Heretaunga plains, larger in its district, and home to the region’s base hospital.

Between and around them: apple and pear orchards, some of New Zealand’s most celebrated vineyards, and the flat, cyclable Heretaunga plain. Beyond, the Kaweka and Ruahine ranges rise inland, the coast runs south past Te Mata Peak to Cape Kidnappers, and north the road climbs towards Wairoa and the East Cape.

What the region buys you is a good life on a clinical salary: sunshine, beaches, remarkable food and wine, a base hospital, and housing that costs meaningfully less than the Bay of Plenty for a similar lifestyle. What it asks of you is a tolerance for distance from a tertiary centre, and an understanding that this is a region still recovering from a serious natural disaster.

Who wrote this
  • Ethicare is a healthcare recruitment company. This guide is free to read, asks nothing of you, and does not give visa advice.
  • Hawke’s Bay is one of the easiest regions to recommend and one we’re careful about, because the lifestyle sells itself and the harder facts — deprivation, distance, the cyclone recovery — need saying out loud. Where we think it’s the wrong answer, we say so.

The region, in nine numbers

~180,000
People across the region, from Wairoa in the north to Central Hawke’s Bay in the south.
~67,000 / ~55,000
Napier and Hastings — twin cities twenty minutes apart, each with its own character and its own loyalties.
2,200+ hrs
Of sunshine a year. Hawke’s Bay competes with Nelson and the Bay of Plenty for sunniest region in the country most years.
1 base hospital
In Hastings, not Napier — a useful thing to know before you choose a suburb. Run by Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora.
~4 hrs
To Wellington, where the region’s tertiary work is referred. Palmerston North is around two and a half.
~20 min
Between the two cities, and from most addresses to a beach. The plain is flat and the distances are short.
~25%
Of Hawke’s Bay people identify as Māori — this is the heartland of Ngāti Kahungunu, the country’s third-largest iwi.
Feb 2023
Cyclone Gabrielle. The region is well into recovery, but it reshaped valleys, communities and the clinical picture, and it is part of the account.
1 great ride
Around 200km of flat, linked cycle trail across the plains and along the coast — one of the best urban cycling networks in New Zealand.

Six things you only learn once you’re here

The hospital is in Hastings
Napier is the better-known city, but the base hospital sits on the Hastings side of the plain. If you work there and live in Napier, that’s a twenty-minute commute each way — fine, but worth deciding deliberately.
Napier and Hastings are different
Napier is coastal, Art Deco, tourism-facing and a little polished. Hastings is inland, larger in its district, more working and more diverse. Locals have firm views. Both are good places to live.
It gets properly hot, and properly dry
Thirty degrees and more in summer, and the region has real drought years. This is the closest the North Island gets to a Mediterranean climate, which is exactly why the wine is so good.
Gabrielle is still present
Two and a half years on, most of the region is fully functioning, but some valleys and communities are still rebuilding, and it comes up in conversation. The region at a glance covers it in detail.
The food is a real reason to come
Not marketing. Gimblett Gravels reds, exceptional chardonnay, orchards in every direction and one of the best farmers’ markets in the country. It changes how you eat.
The seasonal workforce shapes the year
Horticulture brings thousands of seasonal workers, many from the Pacific, into the region each harvest. It affects the population, the economy and the clinical caseload.
A note on names
  • Te Matau-a-Māui — the fish hook of Māui — is the bay’s name in te reo Māori, and the shape of the coastline is the hook. Heretaunga is the plain around Hastings. This is the rohe of Ngāti Kahungunu, whose presence in the health system and the community here is substantial.
  • You’re not expected to arrive fluent. 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 Hawke’s Bay 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 Why Hawke’s Bay for the full case — and what we’d ask you to weigh, and Where clinicians live, because the Napier-or-Hastings question is the first real decision you’ll make here.

Download this guide as a PDF →