New Zealand's Mount Taranaki is a spectacular sight, Jessica Palmer reveals.
It all started with Tom Cruise 23 years ago. The Last Samurai (2003) featured stunning Japanese landscapes and the ever-iconic Mount Fuji. But it turns out it wasn’t Mount Fuji I was admiring but rather Mount Taranaki on New Zealand’s North Island standing in as a ‘stunt double’. Either way, I fell in love with its snowy peaks and near-perfect symmetry from my living room sofa. (Okay, I’ll admit, Tom Cruise helped.)
Aotearoa New Zealand is a well-known location for blockbuster films. The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Avatar: Fire and Ash, and even Peter Jackson’s King Kong were filmed here. But it was a lesser-known movie called The Mountain, which, in 2024, again drew my attention to this fascinating region. The movie centres on an 11-year-old Māori girl with terminal cancer who absconds from hospital to connect with Mount Taranaki. It's through this heartfelt story that we learn that Taranaki is not just a mountain, but an ancestor that holds deep cultural and spiritual significance for Taranaki Māori.
Fast forward another year to 2025, and I found myself reading a news article that shot Mount Taranaki straight to the top of my bucket list. New Zealand’s parliament had unanimously passed a law to grant legal personhood status to Mount Taranaki, acknowledging its cultural significance to the Taranaki Māori.
