Cardrona’s golden future

A REFRAIN from some parts of New Zealand suggests the country’s growth will effectively be confined to Auckland and its surrounds. Big buildings, big population, big business, a big airport — Auckland is evolving into the global city it has long sought to be. Most New Zealanders would accept a strong, successful Auckland is good for the country.

But so too are strong successful regions, and Otago continues to spurn the idea New Zealand’s regions should let go of ambition. Queenstown has long carried the flame for regional ambition but now another oncetiny alpine village is making its own push towards growth, jobs and riches.

More than 150 years ago, people began fossicking for their fortunes in the Cardrona Valley after gold was discovered in the mid1860s. Prospectors and serviceproviders, braving harsh landscapes and brutal weather, built two towns virtually overnight, one where the Car drona Hotel sits and one, now virtually invisible, further down the valley. Pembroke, now called Wanaka, sat at one end of the valley while the goldrich Arrow and Shotover rivers lay just across the mountains to the southwest.

The gold didn’t last and for many decades, apart from its farms, Cardrona Valley sat virtually vacant. Things changed when the valley’s eponymous ski resort, founded in the 1980s, gave people a reason to visit again. About the same time, Dunedin brewery Speight’s created television advertisements featuring the Cardrona Hotel. The road was eventually sealed, people returned and now a whisky distillery, Nordic skiing ‘‘farm’’, globally significant winter cartesting centre and many more businesses line the valley and beyond its ridges.

But recent news suggests much more is coming. As reported in the Otago Daily Times this month plans to significantly expand the Cardrona Alpine Resort into the adjoining Soho Basin have been announced. The expansion would increase the resort’s skiable terrain from 345ha to 900ha, making it the largest resort in the country by a huge margin.

Another July report highlighted plans to build an extensive spa complex on the valley floor, tapping into the appetites of the area’s plentiful tourists while, so far at least, keeping the locals on side. Less glamorous but no less important, a further report detailed Queenstown Lakes District Council’s decision to allocate $3 million over the next two years to an upgraded wastewater system for the valley, improving what has long been a barrier to growth.

Meanwhile, the bulldozers could begin their work next year on a 31ha development, 2km north of the Cardrona Village, near the bottom of the road to the skifield. It is to include an 80bed hotel, an 18hole golf course and 480 mixeddensity housing lots.

While it could be tempting to dismiss tourism infrastructure as less serious than that of Otago’s previous boom industries, the world is changing. The planet’s population is wealthier, healthier, safer and more connected than it has ever been. At the same time, automation and computerisation will continue to change the way we live, work and play. With more money and more free time in the world, it seems tourism is an industry that, barring calamity, is here to stay.

Far from accepting New Zealand’s north as the only area worth investing in, Otago is grasping tourism’s potential better than any other region. People with wealth, ambition, skills and a willingness to toil are putting their faith in Otago and the region is thriving because of it. Cardrona, allbut forgotten about by most New Zealanders just 40 years ago, is to be celebrated for its ongoing role in that success.

There are many locales in Otago which could easily be labelled as abandoned, lost to time, too remote, too harsh, too inhospitable. But with the vision of local people not intimidated by the landscape they live in, these locales may well become the next Cardrona, bringing wealth and a golden future to areas once known for little more than a gilded past. Cardrona may be the next of our region’s golden stories. It will not be the last.