Painted wooden houses on the hills
Wellington
New Zealand's capital: timber houses in many colours stepped up steep green hills around a harbour.
Why Wellington is cable car red
Wellington sits at the southern tip of New Zealand's North Island, on a harbour ringed by steep hills. The region is prone to earthquakes, and after a severe one in 1855 builders turned from brick to timber, which flexes instead of cracking. The result is a city of wooden houses, many of them Victorian and Edwardian villas with bay windows and fretwork, painted in creams, blues, yellows, greens and pinks with contrasting trim. They climb the slopes of suburbs such as Mount Victoria and Thorndon in steps. A bright red cable car, running since 1902, links the centre to the hills. Even the old government offices, built in the 1870s, are made of wood shaped to look like stone.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Wellington" on Wikipedia. If you know Wellington and we have it wrong, tell us.
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🇮🇳 The open-air gallery of RajasthanShekhawatiMerchant mansions in the towns of north Rajasthan are covered inside and out with painted murals.
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🇮🇳 Red earth and a golden sphereAurovilleAn experimental township on red earth near Pondicherry, centred on the golden globe of the Matrimandir.
🇮🇳 Akbar's red sandstone cityFatehpur SikriA Mughal capital built in one red stone in the 1570s and left by the court only a few years later.Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Shekhawati In: Digrajsingh, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kutch In: Zeel Satyendra Modi, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kanchipuram In: Ssriram mt, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Auroville In: Kaspar Konrad, Public domain, source
- Fatehpur Sikri In: HibaSiddiqui, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Rotorua Nz: Pseudopanax at en.wikipedia, Public domain, source