PlaceLayers › Historic moments › Australia and Oceania › The Napier earthquake

The Napier earthquake

Name: The Napier earthquake
Start: 1931-02-03
Location: Napier, Napier, New Zealand

Napier · Napier, New Zealand · 1931-02-03

Two hundred and fifty-six people died and the town was rebuilt at speed in Art Deco, which is now its main industry.

The record

Date	1931-02-03
Place	Napier, Napier, New Zealand
Coordinates	-39.49, 176.92 (city-level precision)
Scope	Local interest
Sources	Wikipedia
Added	2026-08-14 · source: editors

Coordinates are given at city level. A landmark-level coordinate points at the structure; a city-level one points at the settlement, not at a parcel.

Finding photographs

Every one of these is a search, not a guess: the event is documented, so the pictures exist somewhere. Start here.

Wikimedia Commons — freely licensed images, with the licence stated on every file. This is the only source we republish from.
The reference article — its own illustrations, and its citations to archives.
Image search filtered to reusable licences — useful for tracing which institution holds a picture.
National and municipal archives of New Zealand, and the picture desks of newspapers published there at the time.

Check the licence before you reuse anything. A photograph being online, or being old, does not make it free; in most countries a 1960s press photograph is still in copyright.

Footage

Newsreel and archive film of events like this often survives. Search YouTube for this event If you find good footage, send us the link and we will attach it to this page.

Seeded by the editors. This entry was compiled by us from public reference works and is labelled as such, not presented as a reader’s contribution. Sources are listed on the entry. If you know more, or we have it wrong, tell us — corrections are published.

You can add to this page

This entry is a skeleton on purpose. If you were there, if your family was, or if you simply know the place: photographs (yours or ones you have the right to share), comments and corrections to the record above, and observations — what the place was like before, after, what the books get wrong. Everything is read by a person before publication and credited the way you ask.

What readers have added

Nothing yet — this place is waiting for its first memory. The form below takes a date, a story, photographs and links.

Do you know something about Napier, Napier?

Old photographs, what your family remembers being on the corner, a shop that is not on any map we have. Contributions are read by a person before anything is published, and we never publish the names of living people.

Nearby in Australia and Oceania

An event, not a property assessment. This page records what happened at a location. It says nothing about the condition, value or safety of any property there, and it is not part of any environmental record. Methodology and limits.