Taupō

Ngāti Tūwharetoa have held the land around the lake since their ancestors moved inland from the Bay of Plenty coast, and the full name of the lake, Taupō-nui-a-Tia, honours the explorer Tia. The lake itself fills a caldera left by enormous eruptions, the most recent around the year 232, which covered much of the central North Island in ash and remade the Waikato River's outlet.

European settlement at the lake outlet began as a military post. An armed constabulary post was set up in 1868 to strengthen communications across the central North Island, and in 1870 a redoubt was built to guard the river crossing opposite the Ngāti Tūwharetoa pā at Nukuhau; a settlement of traders and constabulary grew around it, linked to the coast by rough roads. Progress was slow for decades: the pumice soils were poor for farming, and the town remained a stop on the way to the volcanoes. What changed it was fish. Rainbow trout, introduced to the lake in the 1890s, thrived there and in its rivers, and Taupō became a place people came to stay and fish, with fishing lodges and launches on the harbour.

The 20th century then brought industry. Exotic pine forests were planted across the plateau, the Wairakei geothermal field was developed for electricity from the 1950s, and hydroelectric dams were built down the Waikato. State Highway 1 runs through the town, which grew into the North Island's main inland holiday destination, adding bungy jumping, skydiving and jet-boating to fishing and boating from the 1980s onwards.

Taupō's identity is built around the lake, and the calendar follows it: boats and jet skis in summer, trout in the colder months, and a long-standing fishing culture with its own etiquette about pools, licences and quiet water. The town is also one of New Zealand's adventure-sport centres, with the country's busiest parachute drop zone at the airport, which makes skydiving one of the sights as much as an activity, and with endurance events — triathlon and a cycling circuit of the lake — that bring in thousands of competitors and give the place a sporting reputation out of proportion to its size.

Māori culture is present rather than staged. This is Tūwharetoa territory, with marae around the lake and at Tūrangi, and the paramount chief's line, the Te Heuheu family, gave the volcanic summits to the Crown in 1887, the gift that led to the creation of Tongariro National Park. Carvings on the cliffs at Mine Bay, cut in the late 1970s by Matahi Whakataka-Brightwell and John Randall, are among the best-known modern Māori artworks in the region.

Otherwise the manners are those of small-town New Zealand: informal, outdoor, practical. The population swells with holiday-home owners from Auckland, Hamilton and Taranaki over Christmas, a division locals note wryly, and the town empties again in the shoulder seasons. Volunteer clubs — surf and boating, rugby, tramping, search and rescue — hold much of the social life together.

About 27,000 people live in Taupō, in a district of about 43,000 that also takes in Tūrangi at the southern end of the lake. The resident population is older than the national average, and a large share of the housing stock is holiday homes, so the town's real size changes sharply with the season.

Work comes from three main sources. Tourism and hospitality employ many people, with obvious seasonal peaks. Energy is the quiet mainstay: the geothermal fields at Wairakei and nearby, and the chain of hydroelectric stations on the Waikato River, generate a significant part of the country's electricity and support skilled technical jobs. Forestry and wood processing on the pumice plateau make up the third, along with farming that has grown on fertilised pumice soils.

Daily life is car-based and spread along the lake. Families live in the suburbs behind the centre — Hilltop, Richmond Heights, Nukuhau and Rainbow Point among them — and use the centre for shopping and the lakefront for recreation. Local concerns include housing costs driven up by holiday-home demand, the health of the lake and the rivers that feed it, and the seasonal strain of a small town serving large visitor numbers. The lake is the town's chief asset, and arguments about how to protect it are never far away.

Taupō eats like a New Zealand holiday town: cafés serving flat whites, eggs and counter food through the morning, bakeries with mince and cheese pies, fish-and-chip shops by the water, and restaurants along the lakefront that lean on lamb, beef, salmon and seasonal vegetables. Summer cooking is largely barbecue cooking, in back gardens and at campgrounds.

The local speciality is not sold in shops. The rainbow and brown trout of the lake and its rivers reach the table through fishing — smoked over mānuka chips, pan-fried, or made into pâté — and some restaurants will cook an angler's own catch. Salmon, often smoked or cured, stands in for it on most menus. Giant river prawns are farmed just north of the town on hot waste water from the Wairakei power station, at what is the country's only prawn farm.

Māori food traditions run through the area in the form of hāngī, meat and vegetables cooked in an earth oven, and kai from the lake and bush; rēwena, the slightly sour potato-starter bread, appears at markets and community events. The surrounding country supplies the rest: honey from the plateau, berries, sweetcorn and stone fruit in late summer, and beer from small breweries in the town.