Waiwera has grown up and discovered wellness

For a certain generation of Aucklanders, Waiwera was less a thermal resort and more a place to spend six hours slowly becoming 40 percent chlorine. You arrived with a towel, lost your friends almost immediately, went down the Black Hole enough times to develop a completely unreasonable confidence in hydroslide engineering, then ate something beige while still slightly wet.

It was excellent. Or at least the version stored in our heads is excellent, which is usually the problem with remembering places from childhood. Waiwera had hot pools, slides, the movie pool, families everywhere and the particular school-holiday energy of hundreds of children being given just enough supervision to remain technically safe.

Then it disappeared. The resort closed in 2018, sat abandoned for years and became increasingly depressing every time you drove north, before the old complex was finally demolished in 2023. For a place that had been part of Auckland life for generations, the ending felt strangely undignified.

Now, after years of plans, Waiwera is properly moving again. A $58 million redevelopment has received resource consent, with construction expected to begin next year and an opening targeted for the middle of 2028.

The renders look nothing like the Waiwera most people remember, which is probably sensible. Studio Pacific Architecture’s plans show 29 geothermal and freshwater pools set among native planting, alongside saunas, cold plunges, spa treatments, reflexology walks, restaurants and quieter spaces where nobody appears to be shouting at a friend to go down the slide backwards.

That last part is important because there are no hydroslides planned.

The developers confirmed it almost immediately, presumably because they understood that Aucklanders would otherwise spend the next two years asking. The new resort is being positioned around relaxation and rejuvenation, while still being intended for families rather than becoming an extremely expensive compound where everyone whispers about their cortisol levels.

Naturally, people are devastated about the slides. The Black Hole in particular appears to occupy an absurd amount of space in the collective Auckland memory, along with Bob’s Mistake and various other attractions whose names now sound like they were created after an incident rather than before one.

It is easy to make fun of the new direction because almost everything from our childhood eventually seems to return wearing linen and talking about wellness. Waiwera, where kids once discovered that a tiny amount of soap could dramatically alter their hydroslide performance, is now offering cold immersion and reflexology.

But the more you look at it, the more the grown-up version makes sense. Right?

Waiwera was never remarkable because somebody built a waterslide there. Beneath the site is geothermal water that has attracted people to the area for generations, with commercial bathing taking place there for around 150 years and the underground thermal water estimated to be tens of thousands of years old. The old resort eventually built so much around that fact that it became easy to forget the hot water itself was the extraordinary bit.

The redevelopment is putting that back in the middle. Instead of competing with every water park for the loudest possible school-holiday experience, it is leaning into the thing Waiwera has that almost nowhere else near Auckland does: naturally heated mineral water coming out of the ground about 40 kilometres from the city.

The timing is also strangely good. Somewhere between our childhood Waiwera visits and adulthood, everyone became obsessed with saunas, cold plunges and paying money to sit silently in hot water. Thermal bathing has become cool again, except now the people doing it call it recovery and own significantly nicer drink bottles.

New Zealand has become particularly good at selling that experience. Queenstown has hot pools looking over mountains, Maruia has its thermal retreat, and almost every nice hotel now seems one cedar sauna away from describing itself as a wellness destination. Auckland has had one of the country’s most famous geothermal sites sitting on its doorstep the entire time, except for the minor issue that it was closed and slowly falling apart.

The new Waiwera is meant to fix that. Project forecasts suggest the resort could eventually attract more than 300,000 visitors a year and create a substantial number of jobs, although those numbers remain projections until someone actually opens the gates and convinces Aucklanders to drive up State Highway 1 with their robes in the boot.

The bigger challenge might be convincing us not to demand our childhood back when we arrive.

Nostalgia is unfair because what people really want is not the old Waiwera exactly as it was when it closed. By then the place had already lost plenty of its shine. What we want is Waiwera when we were younger, when a dark plastic tube felt genuinely dangerous, the movie pool was the height of technology and spending an entire day in wet board shorts did not create a single physical complaint.

No architect can rebuild that part.

What they can rebuild is the reason generations of Aucklanders went to Waiwera in the first place, and there is something genuinely nice about the site getting another life rather than remaining another fenced-off piece of regional memory. The hot water is still underneath it, the hills are still there and, by 2028, people should finally be able to turn off the motorway and go back in.

It will just be a different Waiwera for a different version of us. Instead of screaming through the Black Hole, we will apparently be sitting in a mineral pool discussing whether the cold plunge is good for inflammation.

Honestly, that sounds about right.