King Country is an area covering about 10,000 square miles (25,900 square kilometers) in the central part of the North Island of New Zealand. Its borders are the Rangitoto Mountains in the north, the Pirongia Ranges in the east, the western half of Lake Taupo in the south, and the Waipa Valley in the west. In the south, mountain ranges rise to 9,175 feet (2,797 meters) above sea level at Mount Ruapehu and to 6,550 feet (1,996 meters) at Mount Tongariro. European settlers began to call the region King Country after the followers of the king movement (or Kīngitanga), which sought to unite New Zealand’s Māori people under a single Māori monarch, took refuge there in the 1860’s. The king movement refused to sell land to Europeans and kept European settlers out of the region almost entirely until the 1880’s.
