Te Waimate Mission

Walk in the footsteps of Charles Darwin who arrived on the doorstep of Te Waimate in 1835 and was enchanted by the model English farm and Mission Station.

The great experiment, Te Waimate emerges as a place of agricultural adaptation and development as they attempted to import an entire food landscape from the other side of the globe.

Take in the serene rural environment of New Zealand’s first English farm as Te Waimate introduces you to stories of endeavour, perseverance, failure and conflict. Farming gives way to theology, but a military occupation and martial law consume it all with the outbreak of war in 1845.