Monkey Island Beach

Monkey Island Beach covers 1.1 km, near Orepuki in Southland.

Monkey Island sits at the south end of Aropaki Beach on the Orepuki coast, a small islet just off the sand with the Southern Ocean on one side and Te Waewae Bay curving away to the west. Inge, who sent this one in with Pip, called it a popular day destination with enough parking, and she is right on both counts: there is a council camping area on the flat behind the beach and a car park at the end of Monkey Island Road. She was also right about the rule, and it is worth spelling out because the tourism listing she found does not mention dogs at all. Her words were that dogs are allowed, officially on leash. Southland District Council carries its local dog rules as per-town maps in Schedule 2 of the Dog Control Bylaw 2025, and the Orepuki sheet, prepared 12 September 2025 and in force from 1 October 2025, shades the Monkey Island Camping Area and its beach frontage in the legend class Dog on lead areas. So the lead is on, and it stays on. Reading that sheet class by class, there is no dog exercise area anywhere on it, which means there is nowhere at Orepuki or Monkey Island where a dog may lawfully be off the lead. Inge put the reality of it better than we could: hardly anybody does. One prohibition exists at Orepuki and it is nowhere near the beach. The map draws exactly one polygon in the Dog prohibited areas class, the playground in the township between Truro Street and Oldham Street, and Schedule 1 prohibits dogs on any playground or sports ground at all times in any case. Everything else the sheet shades, the township between Denbigh and Dudley Streets including Aropaki Reserve, the roads out to Mullans and Thomas, and the camping area at Monkey Island, is on lead. If you had heard that the beachfront here was going to be closed to dogs, that was a proposal put out for consultation during the 2025 review, and it is not what the council adopted. The islet itself is a different authority and a different answer. Monkey Island is a conservation area administered by the Department of Conservation, and DOC's standing rule is that you may not take a pet onto conservation land without its permission, which includes reserves. We can find no published dog approval for it, so the walk mapped here stays on the sand and does not go out over the neck to the rock. No track is mapped on this beach, so the line simply runs down the middle of the sand. Treat it as the shape of the shore rather than a route, because the walkable ground moves with the tide. It is about 1.1 km from the Monkey Island end north along Aropaki Beach, so a little over 2.2 km if you walk it out and back, and it is flat the whole way. The sand carries on north past where our line stops, and Inge mentions you can walk round to Gemstone Beach. You can, and the council rule does not change on the way: the whole of this coast on the Orepuki sheet is on lead, with no exercise area anywhere on it. We have stopped the line short of Gemstone Beach for a different reason. The strip of land behind the sand that way is DOC stewardship land and marginal strip, and DOC publishes no dog rule for either parcel, so rather than draw a line whose landward edge we cannot source we have drawn only the frontage we can. Walk on if you want the gemstones, keep to the wet sand, and keep the lead on. One standing caution for this coast. New Zealand sea lions are Nationally Endangered and DOC lists harassment by dogs among the threats to them, and it records non-breeding animals turning up along the south and east coasts of the South Island, which is this coast. A resting animal on open sand is easy to miss until you are close, so scan well ahead, keep the lead short and give a wide berth. It is an offence under the Marine Mammals Protection Act 1978 to disturb, harass, harm, injure or kill one, and DOC says a dog owner whose dog attacks a seal could face prosecution. Report harassment to 0800 DOC HOT. Last thing, and it beats everything above. Clause 10 lets the council change these areas temporarily by public notice, meaning legible notices put up on or beside the area, and it names protected wildlife vulnerable to dogs and pest control as reasons for doing it. If there is a sign at the beach, the sign wins over the map. Pick up after your dog and carry it out: the bylaw requires faeces to be removed immediately.

Expect easy, near-level going, and takes about 12 min to walk.

Dogs are allowed here, on the lead. This walk is on the map because Inge & Pip suggested it, and we checked it against the source above.