The earth's crust between the Waitemata and Manukau harbours is so thin that every few thousand years, magma finds a fissure and bursts onto the surface, producing yet another volcano. The most recent eruption, some six hundred years ago, formed Rangitoto Island, to the horror of some of the region's earliest Maori inhabitants settled on adjacent Motutapu Island. Legend records their ancestors' arrival on the Tamaki Isthmus, the narrowest neck of land between the Waitemata and Manukau harbours. With plentiful catches from two harbours and rich volcanic soils on a wealth of highly defensible volcano-top sites, the land, which they came to know as Tamaki-makau-rau ("the spouse sought by a hundred lovers"), was the prize of numerous battles over the centuries. By the middle of the eighteenth century it had fallen to Kiwi Tamaki , who established a three-thousand-strong pa or fortified village on Maungakiekie ("One Tree Hill"), and a satellite pa on just about every volcano in the district, but was eventually overwhelmed by rival hapu (sub-tribes) from Kaipara Harbour to the north.

With the arrival of musket-trading Europeans in the Bay of Islands around the beginning of the nineteenth century, Northland Ngapuhi were able to launch successful raids on the Tamaki Maori which, combined with the predations of smallpox epidemics, left the region almost uninhabited, a significant factor in its choice as the new capital after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Scottish medic John Logan Campbell was one of few European residents when this fertile land, with easy access to major river and sea-borne trading routes, was purchased for £55 and some blankets. The capital was roughly laid out and Campbell took advantage of his early start, wheeling and dealing to achieve control of half the city, eventually becoming mayor and "the father of Auckland". After 1840, immigrants boosted the population to the extent that more land was needed, a demand which partly precipitated the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s .

During the depression that followed, many sought their fortunes in the Otago goldfields and, as the balance of European population shifted south, so did the centre of government. Auckland lost its capital status to Wellington in 1865 and the city slumped further, only seeing the glimpse of a recovery when prospectors flooded through on their way to the gold mines around Thames in the late 1860s. Since then Auckland has never looked back, repeatedly ranking as New Zealand's fastest growing city and absorbing waves of migrants, initially from Britain then, in the 1960s and 1970s from the Polynesian Islands of the South Pacific and, most recently, from Asian countries. Rising with its head high after the depression years of the early 1990s, and a brief slump after the Asian financial melt down, Auckland is confidently leading New Zealand's renaissance as a modern nation, accepted on its own terms.