page_title: Taranaki
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Taranaki / Geography
caption_attribution_description: Picture of Mount Egmont taken from Glanville Road, Stratford, Taranaki, New Zealand. Taken by me with a 35mm camera. I release it into the public domain.
context_page_description: Taranaki is a region in the west of New Zealand's North Island. It is named after its main geographical feature, the stratovolcano of Mount Taranaki, also known as Mount Egmont.
  The main centre is the city of New Plymouth. The New Plymouth District is home to more than 65 per cent of the population of Taranaki. New Plymouth is in North Taranaki along with Inglewood and Waitara. South Taranaki towns include Hāwera, Stratford, Eltham, and Opunake.
  Since 2005, Taranaki has used the promotional brand "Like no other".
context_section_description: Taranaki is on the west coast of the North Island, surrounding the volcanic peak of Mount Taranaki. The region covers an area of 7258 km². Its large bays north-west and south-west of Cape Egmont are North Taranaki Bight and South Taranaki Bight.
  Mount Taranaki or Mount Egmont, the second highest mountain in the North Island, is the dominant geographical feature of the region. A Māori legend says that Taranaki previously lived with the Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu mountains of the central North Island but fled to its current location after a battle with Tongariro. A near-perfect cone, it last erupted in the mid-18th century. The mountain and its immediate surrounds form Egmont National Park.
  Māori had called the mountain Taranaki for many centuries, and Captain James Cook gave it the English name of Egmont after the Earl of Egmont, the recently retired First Lord of the Admiralty who had encouraged his expedition. The mountain has two alternative official names, "Mount Taranaki" and "Mount Egmont".
  The region is exceptionally fertile thanks to generous rainfall and rich volcanic soil. Dairy farming predominates, with Fonterra's Whareroa milk factory just outside of Hāwera producing the largest volume of dairy ingredients from a single factory anywhere in the world. There are also oil and gas deposits in the region, both on- and off-shore. The Maui gas field off the south-west coast has provided most of New Zealand's gas supply and once supported two methanol plants, (one formerly a synthetic-petrol plant called the Gas-To-Gasoline plant) at Motunui. Fuel and fertiliser is also produced at a well complex at Kapuni and a number of smaller land-based oilfields. With the Maui field nearing depletion, new offshore resources have been developed: the Kupe field, 30 km south of Hāwera and the Pohokura gas field, 4.5 km north of Waitara.
  The way the land mass projects into the Tasman Sea with northerly, westerly and southerly exposures, results in many excellent surfing and windsurfing locations, some of them considered world-class.
caption: View of Mount Taranaki from Stratford, facing west.  Fanthams Peak is to the left of the main peak. The cow in the foreground is emblematic of Taranaki as a major dairying region.
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