Baring Head
point in New Zealand
Baring Head (Māori: Ōrua-pouanui, officially gazetted as Baring Head / Ōrua-pouanui) is a headland, located between Wellington Harbour and Palliser Bay at the southern end of the North Island of New Zealand. It marks the southern end of Fitzroy Bay.
The Baring Head Lighthouse, built in 1935, was the first light in New Zealand to start operating immediately on electricity.
The Baring Head Atmospheric Research Station, administered by National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, provides the longest continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the Southern Hemisphere.
The headland is administered by Wellington Regional Council as part of East Harbour Regional Park.
Geography
The reserve includes the lower reaches and mouth of Wainuiomata River and the coastal encampment around Baring Head. The rugged hills are visible from parts of Wellington City.
Baring Head is one of the Wellington Region's “coastal habitats of significance for indigenous birds”. There are at least nine at-risk bird species: the black shag, Caspian tern, New Zealand pipit, pied shag, pied stilt, red-billed gull, variable oystercatcher, white-fronted tern and the banded dotterel. The banded dotterel has a breeding site at Baring Head.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4860763. Authority coordinates are -41.407, 174.867. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935.
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This entry incorporates text from “Baring Head” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.