Horeke Hotel, Horeke — claims 1833

The claim

A remote waterfront hotel on the upper Hokianga Harbour at Horeke, where Europeans built ships in the 1820s. It claims to be New Zealand's oldest surviving pub, dating to 1833, though it traded without a licence in its early days. Parts of today's building date from 1923. Check current opening before making the long drive.

What the records show

The claim is the hotel's, reported by the New Zealand Herald: the Horeke claims to be the country's oldest surviving pub, with a history dating to 1833, though the Herald adds that it was not legally licensed then. RNZ (2018) notes parts may date to the 1820s shipbuilding era. No documentary evidence has been published. The Herald described it in 2020 as trading with food and lodging, and the Bay of Islands tourism listing still shows it open on the Hokianga waterfront. The hotel's own site was read on 18 September 2026 and raises a question this page has to put plainly: it offers rooms, e-bike hire and a shuttle for riders of the Twin Coast trail, describes its dining as for guests only, asks for bookings by email and reproduces a guest's line that this is not a hotel to drop in to. Nothing it publishes says whether a traveller who is not staying may walk in and be served a drink, and the answer to that is what decides whether a house belongs on this site at all. Until somebody in Hokianga can answer it, the trading is recorded as believed rather than confirmed. There is a harder reading than the hotel’s own words, and it was made on 18 September 2026. New Zealand’s Ministry of Justice publishes the national register of active alcohol licences every month; the August 2026 file holds 12,086 rows and not one of them mentions Horeke — not the hotel, not its street, not the settlement. The register does hold the hotels at Opononi, Mangonui, Waipapakauri and Awanui, which is the control that says the search would have found this house had it been licensed. A monthly register can lag a transfer, and a licence may be held in a name nobody here has guessed, so this is not a statement that the bar is shut. It is a statement that nothing public shows a licence to sell drink at this address, which for a house on a site about pubs is the question rather than a detail.

What to look for inside

Claims to be New Zealand's oldest surviving pub (1833)
Beside the site of an 1820s shipyard

Visiting

Horeke Hotel is in Horeke, New Zealand. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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