Nelson Provincial Museum

The Nelson Provincial Museum, Pupuri Taonga O Te Tai Ao, sits a short walk from Trafalgar Square and covers the natural and human history of the top of the South Island. The permanent gallery on the ground floor walks through the geology, Māori settlement, European arrival, and the development of the Nelson region; upstairs houses changing exhibitions, often focused on a single object or theme.

The museum is small enough to do in an hour or two, which is about right for a wet morning. The shop has good local books, and the building itself — restrained modernist concrete and glass — won architecture awards when it opened in 2005.

things to do museum
A story
The museum holds the Maungatautari moa — bones of New Zealand's largest extinct bird, found in a swamp near Nelson in the 1860s. Early European naturalists were astonished: standing reconstructions suggested the bird was over three metres tall. Hunting and habitat change had wiped the moa out within a couple of centuries of Polynesian arrival, long before any European saw one alive.