A coastal arch on the Coromandel Peninsula where centuries of wave action have carved through a white rhyolite headland, creating a cathedral-proportioned opening between two white-sand coves.
Cathedral Cove is reached by boat or by a 45-minute walk down a track through coastal forest, and the arrival is always the same: a white arch in white rock, beyond which the Hahei Beach side glows cobalt, and through which the two coves — connected by nothing else — meet in a passage tall enough to sail a small boat through.
The rock is rhyolite, white and fine-grained, formed from volcanic activity 8 million years ago. The sea has been working on it ever since, finding the weak points, the joints in the rock, the places where the cliff was thinnest and most permeable to wave pressure. What it has produced in the headland between the two coves is not a simple hole but an arch with the proportions of a cathedral nave — 30 metres high, the walls nearly vertical, the ceiling domed by the natural structure of the rock.
Inside the arch, on calm days, the water is clear to the bottom and moves slowly back and forth with a sound that is part water and part resonance — the arch acts as a partial resonator, and the sound of the sea inside it has a quality that the same sound outside does not have.
The cove is in the Te Whanganui-A-Hei Marine Reserve. All taking of marine life is prohibited. The fish in the clear water below the arch have been protected for decades and are less wary than fish outside reserves — they come closer, move more slowly, hold their positions longer. The arch stands 400 metres from the car park as the crow flies, and approximately 45 minutes as the person walks.