Remarkables Park
The Remarkables mountain range rises sharply behind the carpark, snow-dusted for much of the year, and that backdrop does a lot of work for what is, at its core, a well-organised open-air shopping precinct on Hawthorne Drive in Frankton. Wooden benches, sheltered walkways, and the occasional drift of music from The Shelter restaurant above give the place a tempo slower than a typical retail strip.
What draws people here beyond the supermarket run is the Saturday market — local produce, plants, coffee, a sandpit for children — and the quiet usefulness of finding a reformer pilates studio, a float centre, and a decent dentist all within a few minutes of each other and Queenstown Airport.
💛 What travellers fall for
Regulars tend to time a visit around the Saturday market, arriving before 10am when the coffee queues are short and the produce tables still full. The walking trail toward the Kawarau River is worth knowing about — a ten-minute stroll from the centre that earns a longer coffee stop on the way back.
Deals in Remarkables Park
Book directly at the providerHow Remarkables Park came to be
The 150-hectare Remarkables Park Zone was conceived as a mixed-use development — retail, resort, residential, and recreational — on land in Frankton that sits between the airport and the lake edge. The Porter Group, through its subsidiary Remarkables Park Limited, drove the project, with brothers Alastair, John, and Neville Porter as co-managing directors and long-standing figures in the Queenstown business community.
The original master plan came from Eldon Beck, an urban design and landscape architecture practitioner whose brief was to create something more coherent than a standard retail strip. The result, built out over more than two decades, is a precinct that still reads as planned rather than accumulated — modest by Queenstown's alpine drama, but considered in its layout.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summer (December to February) brings warm days up to 30°C, ideal for lingering at the market or walking down to the Kawarau River. Winter days hover between 0°C and 8°C — the town centre itself rarely sees snow, but the Remarkables above are heavily white from June through August, which makes the backdrop considerably more dramatic.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.