- published: 20 May 2014
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The Auckland metropolitan area ( /ˈɔːklənd/, AWK-lənd), in the North Island of New Zealand, is the largest and most populous urban area in the country with 1,377,200 residents, 31 percent of the country's population. Auckland has the largest Polynesian population of any city in the world. In Māori Auckland's names are Tāmaki Makaurau, and the transliterated version of Auckland, Ākarana.
The 2011 Mercer Quality of Living Survey ranked Auckland 3rd equal place in the world on its list, while the Economist's World's Most Livable Cities index of 2011 ranked Auckland in 9th place. In 2010, Auckland was classified as a Beta World City in the World Cities Study Group’s inventory by Loughborough University.
Auckland lies between the Hauraki Gulf of the Pacific Ocean to the east, the low Hunua Ranges to the south-east, the Manukau Harbour to the south-west, and the Waitakere Ranges and smaller ranges to the west and north-west. The central part of the urban area occupies a narrow isthmus between the Manukau Harbour on the Tasman Sea and the Waitemata Harbour on the Pacific Ocean. It is one of the few cities in the world to have harbours on two separate major bodies of water.
The Auckland Domain is Auckland's oldest park, and at 75 hectares one of the largest in the city. Located in the central suburb of Grafton, the park contains all of the explosion crater and most of the surrounding tuff ring of the Pukekawa volcano.
The park is home to one of Auckland's main tourist attractions, the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which sits prominently on the crater rim (tuff ring). Several sports fields occupy the floor of the crater, circling to the south of the cone, while the rim opposite the Museum hosts the cricket pavilion and Auckland City Hospital. The Wintergarden, with two beautiful glass houses, lie on the north side of the central scoria cone. The fernery has been constructed in an old quarry in part of the cone.The duck ponds lie in the northern sector of the explosion crater, which is breached to the north with a small overflow stream.
The Auckland Domain volcano, Pukekawa, is one of the oldest in the Auckland Volcanic Field, and consists of a large explosion crater surrounded by a tuff ring with a small scoria cone (Pukekaroro) in the centre of the crater. Its tuff ring, created by many explosive eruptions, is made of a mixture of volcanic ash, lapilli and fragmented sandstone country rock. Its eruption followed soon (in geological terms) after the neighbouring Grafton Volcano was created, destroying that volcano's eastern parts and burying the rest.