The Whare Flat Folk Festival is one of New Zealand's oldest and most beloved music gatherings, held each New Year at a farm near Dunedin in the Otago hills. For nearly fifty years, it has brought together folk musicians and music lovers from across New Zealand and beyond for a camping festival of extraordinary warmth and community spirit — a New Year's celebration that feels genuinely apart from the commercial world and deeply connected to the traditions of folk music and communal gathering.
The festival is known for its participatory culture — workshops where you can learn an instrument or a song, sessions where musicians gather informally to play, dances, storytelling and the particular magic of an event where the audience and the performers are often the same people. The Whare Flat setting — a farm in the Otago hills, with views across the surrounding countryside — is simple and perfect, providing a stage for music that values authenticity, community and the joy of singing together.
For folk music enthusiasts, Whare Flat is a pilgrimage — one of those festivals that has been shaped by decades of community investment into something genuinely irreplaceable. For visitors to New Zealand over the New Year period who want an experience of local culture that goes well beyond the tourist trail, a few days at Whare Flat offers something rare and valuable — a glimpse of New Zealand at its most community-spirited and musically alive.