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Few places in New Zealand earn their reputation quite as completely as Waitomo. Tucked into the rolling limestone country of the Waikato, roughly two hours south of Auckland, this small settlement in the King Country draws visitors from across the world for a single, extraordinary reason: the caves beneath it are alive with light. The glowworm, Arachnocampa luminosa, is found nowhere else on earth outside New Zealand and Australia, and the colonies that colonise the ceilings of the Waitomo cave system produce a spectacle that is genuinely difficult to describe to someone who has not seen it. Thousands of tiny blue-green lights reflected in still underground water, in complete silence, in the dark. It is one of those experiences that resists the camera.

The caves themselves are not a single attraction but a network of distinct systems, each with its own character. The Waitomo Glowworm Caves, the most visited, combine a guided walk through cathedral-scale limestone chambers with a boat passage beneath the famous glowworm grotto. Ruakuri Cave, longer and more dramatic in its formations, offers a different proposition entirely: a spiral descent into a world of stalactites, underground streams, and passages that have been carved over millions of years. Aranui Cave, the quietest of the three main systems, is known for its delicate pink and white formations rather than glowworms, and tends to attract visitors who want to linger over the geology rather than the spectacle.