History of the Waitomo Caves

Hours, prices and access verified by the Waitomo Caves tours team — last checked August 26, 2026

In December 1887 a local Maori chief and an English surveyor floated into the cave on a raft of flax stems, holding candles. The caves opened to visitors two years later, passed to the government in 1906, and were handed back to the descendants of the original owners in 1989. Your guide may be one of them, on any hobbiton and waitomo caves tour that goes into the show cave.

Before 1887

The caves were not discovered in 1887. Local Maori knew the entrances long before, and the name they carried says as much: wai, water, and tomo, the shaft or hole that water disappears into. What happened in 1887 was the first recorded exploration of the system from the inside.

The raft, the candle and the first descent

Chief Tāne Tinorau and the English surveyor Fred Mace went in together, on a raft made of flax stems, carrying candles. They entered from the stream and worked upstream into the dark. The glowworm ceiling was what they found.

It is worth pausing on what that took. Candlelight in a cave shows you a few metres of wall; the ceiling they were floating under was invisible until they stopped and let the flame die down.

Open to visitors, 1889

Two years later the cave was open to visitors, with Tāne Tinorau and his wife Huti running the tours themselves. That makes it one of the oldest tourist attractions in New Zealand, and it has been operating on the same principle ever since: a guide, a boat, and a ceiling.

The government years, from 1906

Administration of the caves passed to the government in 1906. The family that had opened them lost control of the operation, and for most of the twentieth century the caves were run by the state.

The 1989 return

In 1989 the caves were returned to the descendants of the original Maori owners, and the operation has been run with their involvement since. It is the part of the story the tour itself carries: guides at the show cave may be descended from the man who first went in with a candle.

What Waitomo means

Wai is water. Tomo is a hole, a shaft, the place a stream drops out of sight. The name describes the landscape rather than the cave — the whole district is punctuated by them, and the photographs of a caver on a rope in the gallery are looking down one.

Who runs the caves now

The show cave, Ruakuri and Aranui are operated from a single visitor centre at 39 Waitomo Village Road. The cave tour booked through these pages is run by the Waitomo Caves Group, and it is the same 45-minute walk and boat ride whether you buy it alone or inside a day trip from Auckland.

The chronology

Dated entries here are being re-checked against the operator’s own record and may be revised; the present-day rows come from current listings.

Visiting in the early days

The early tours were candlelit and the boat was worked by hand along a wire, which is still how the boat moves through the Grotto today. Almost nothing about the mechanics of the visit has changed in more than a century; what has changed is the lighting in the dry chambers and the number of people the cave takes in a day.

The one rule that has hardened is the camera ban. Early visitors photographed what they could by magnesium flash; today nothing electronic comes in at all, for reasons set out on the glowworms.