Taurangaਤੌਰੰਗਾ

Tauranga is a coastal city in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand's fifth most populous city, wrapped around a large harbour under the cone of Mauao, Mount Maunganui, with 152,844 people in the 2023 census. Its Punjabi story belongs to the wider bay: the Bay of Plenty counted 6,324 Sikhs in 2023, 1.89 per cent of the region, the highest Sikh share of any New Zealand region, built largely on the kiwifruit orchards around Tauranga and nearby Te Puke.

Where is Tauranga, and why do Punjabis live there?

Tauranga lies in the northwestern corner of the Bay of Plenty on the North Island's east coast, on the southeastern edge of Tauranga Harbour, protected from the Pacific by Matakana Island and Mauao, the 232 metre volcanic cone locals call the Mount. The name Tauranga means a resting place or anchorage in Māori, and Māori settled here in the late 13th century. Europeans followed in the early 19th century, the town was gazetted as a borough in 1882 and constituted a city in 1963, and the Port of Tauranga has grown into New Zealand's largest export port. The city covers suburbs from Bethlehem and Ōtūmoetai to Mount Maunganui across the harbour and Pāpāmoa, its largest suburb, along the coast.

Punjabis live in Tauranga and its surrounding bay because the land around it grows kiwifruit, avocados and citrus, and horticulture needs people who know farming. Since the early 1990s thousands of Indian migrants have come to the Bay of Plenty, mostly to work in the kiwifruit industry, and many have moved from orchard work to contracting businesses and orchards of their own. Tauranga, as the bay's city, holds the temples, shops and services that the orchard towns draw on, and it follows Auckland and Hamilton in this series' map of Punjabi places in New Zealand.

What do the numbers say?

Tauranga City counted 152,844 people in the 2023 census, up 11.5 per cent since 2018 and 32.7 per cent since 2013, with a median age of 39.4. People of Asian ethnicities made up 10.3 per cent of the city, alongside 78.7 per cent European and 19.3 per cent Māori, and 25.2 per cent of residents were born overseas. Panjabi was spoken by 3,120 people in the city, 2.0 per cent of Tauranga, and the Indian ethnic group numbered 7,197 people, 4.7 per cent of the city.

For religion, the Stats NZ place summary for Tauranga City does not list Sikhism separately, folding it into an other religions, beliefs and philosophies group of 3.3 per cent, so no exact Tauranga City Sikh total is stated here. The regional picture is clearer and striking: the Bay of Plenty region counted 6,324 Sikhs in 2023, 1.89 per cent of the region, the highest share of any of New Zealand's sixteen regions, ahead of Auckland's 1.71 per cent, and up from 4,842 in 2018 and 2,748 in 2013. Nationally, Sikhs numbered 53,406 in 2023, 1.07 per cent of the country.

Kiwifruit country: Te Puke and the orchard belt

The Punjabi heartland of the bay is the orchard country southeast of the city, around Te Puke, the town that calls itself the kiwifruit capital of the world. New Zealand Geographic's reporting from the bay describes how the Indian population of the Western Bay of Plenty grew more than five fold in two decades on the kiwifruit industry's demand for labour, with over half of those people identifying as Sikhs, most with connections to rural Punjab. On Saturday nights the Sikh temple in Te Puke fills with several hundred people from around the Bay of Plenty after a week in the vines, and at the time of that reporting two thirds of the shops on Te Puke's main street were Indian owned. The story it tells, of workers saving to buy sections, then orchards, then contracting businesses employing the next arrivals, is the same farming ladder Punjabis climbed in the Waikato dairy country, rebuilt here in kiwifruit. Tauranga's Punjabi families are part of that belt: orchard workers and owners, contractors, students and city workers, served by the city's own temples.

Gurdwaras in Tauranga

Tauranga has two gurdwaras of its own. The Gurdwara Sikh Sangat Tauranga stands on Burrows Street in Tauranga South, the temple of the Tauranga Sikh Sangat, serving prayer, langar and community events for the Bay of Plenty. Across the city in Pyes Pa, the Gurdwara Sri Kalgidhar Sahib on Cheyne Road, run by the Tauranga Sikh Society, serves the fast growing southern suburbs. Together with the Bay of Plenty temple at Te Puke, they give the region a chain of gurdwaras from the city into the orchard belt, the same pattern seen across Punjabi New Zealand: the temple first, then the community life around it.

Tauranga is the Bay of Plenty's harbour city, New Zealand's biggest export port and one of its fastest growing cities, and its region holds the country's highest Sikh share: a Punjabi community rooted in kiwifruit country, with two city gurdwaras and the Te Puke temple down the road. For the full map, see Punjabi places in New Zealand.