Albert Park is a beautiful and serene park situated in the centre of downtown Auckland, a reprieve from busy city life and frequented by many suit-and-tie guys and students on their lunch-breaks each day.

Albert Park was originally the site of the Albert Barracks, one of Auckland’s early European military fortifications, which was converted into a public park in the 1880s.  But it is not Albert Park itself that exudes intrigue… but what lies beneath.What most people don’t know is that underneath Albert Park is over 3.5 kilometres of man-made tunnels built during the war to shelter over 20,000 people in the event of an air-raid.  The tunnels consist of a network of shelters, sanitation facilities and first aid posts, all ventilated by air shafts, with a total of nine entrances.  Fortunately, the expected air raids did not eventuate, but with the tunnels unused, by the end of 1943 the timber supports were beginning to fail. By February 1945, the tunnels were filled in with unfired clay bricks, the entrances buried and the air shafts and other shafts in-filled.

And so the tunnels remain to this day…

This, my friends is the stuff adventure is made of.  I don’t know about you, but the Indiana-Jones-alter-ego in me screams out to throw caution to the wind…  to look for an entrance, rediscover long-forgotten places and flee from giant boulders (okay perhaps not flee from giant boulders ).  As this site shows, there have been exposed entrances in recent years and intrepid (or insane depending on how you look at it) explorers have ventured inside.

What I am dying to know is:

• Are they still accessible today?  (One article written in march 2009 said they still are.)
• Will my wife let me?  (Happy wife happy life.)
• If the answer to the above questions is “Yes”, who’s keen for a roadtrip to Albert Park (and beneath)?

Further Albert Park tunnel info: to whet your adventurer’s appetite: