St Peter's Anglican Church is Queenstown's oldest surviving public building — a small Gothic Revival stone church on Church Street completed in 1863, during the gold-rush boom that made Queenstown a proper town from the miners' camp it had been two years earlier. The church was funded by public subscription from the rush's early miners and built with stone quarried from the lakeshore.
The church's carved Rimu (native timber) interior, stained glass windows, and the small adjacent graveyard (with headstones dating to the 1860s — several Chinese miners, a drowned sailor, and a victim of an 1868 boarding-house fire) provide the town's most concentrated encounter with its gold-rush origins. The congregation is small and services are informal, but the church is open to visitors most days and hosts occasional classical concerts that use the excellent interior acoustics.
Verified Facts
St Peter's was completed in 1863
It is Queenstown's oldest surviving public building
The church was built with stone from the Lake Wakatipu shore
The graveyard includes headstones from the 1860s gold rush
Get walking directions
2 Church St, Queenstown, 9300, New Zealand
