How 30 Residents Keep New Zealand Town Alive With Campground

In Ōkārito, New Zealand, 30 people are proving that the smallest communities can create the biggest impact.

This remote West Coast village sits 13 kilometers off the main highway, where the nearest supermarket requires a 90-minute drive and post boxes are 30 kilometers away. It's the kind of isolation that would doom most towns, but Ōkārito found an ingenious solution.

The town's secret? A community-run campground that turns visitors into lifelines.

Robyn Jebson, a 12-year resident who first visited as a camper herself, helps manage what locals call "the community business." The Ōkārito Community Association runs the campground as a nonprofit, pouring every extra dollar back into the town and surrounding nature.

The story started in the 1970s when freedom campers left beaches littered with trash and bonfire scars. The Department of Lands and Survey partnered with residents to transform a sheep-grazed field into an official campground with basic amenities.

Five decades later, those same community values keep the place thriving. Volunteers rotate through two to four week shifts during peak season, managing up to 100 campers while maintaining showers, picnic areas, and barbecue facilities.

The Ripple Effect

The campground's revenue does far more than keep lights on. Funds support predator control programs protecting New Zealand's rarest kiwi, the rowi, which lives in the surrounding forests alongside 70 other bird species.

Money also restored Donovan's Store, the West Coast's oldest building, transforming it into a community hub where residents gather. White herons from a nearby breeding colony feed at the lagoon during summer, drawing nature lovers and ornithologists who boost the local economy.

Every camping fee becomes a vote for conservation. Every visitor helps a town of 30 maintain facilities that cities ten times larger struggle to provide.

The model works because residents never stopped believing their town mattered. Where others saw a dying gold rush relic that peaked at 4,000 residents with 25 hotels and three theaters, Ōkārito's locals saw opportunity in stunning beaches, pristine lagoons, and nature reserves.

They turned isolation into an attraction and scarcity into stewardship. Campers leave with memories of kayaking, hiking, and fishing in one of New Zealand's most beautiful settings, never realizing their vacation dollars just funded next year's native plant restoration.

Jebson notes that between the lagoon, beach access, and bird watching opportunities, visitors find plenty to love. The campground stays deliberately basic because comfort isn't the point, connection is.

In an era when small towns across the world fade into ghost towns, Ōkārito chose community action over resignation. Thirty people refuse to let their home become another abandoned dot on a map, one camping fee at a time.