'Def worth a trespass': Instagram users risk it all to frolic in New Zealand infinity pools

They climb over barbed wire, past “private property” signs and pose precariously on the edge of a 50-metre cliff face – all to get the perfect Instagram shot. A growing number of social media users are trespassing on private property at a beach west of Auckland to frolic in natural “infinity pools” on a cliff top – some in the nude – and driving the owners to despair.

“We’ve absolutely had enough,” said Buzz Kronfeld, part of a family who owns three plots of land at Anawhata Beach, 50km from New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland.

Anawhata is pristine, remote and wild, and the view from high above it on Kronfeld’s property, might be – unfortunately for its owners – among the best in New Zealand. Now, chasing off would-be Instagram stars has become a full-time source of stress for its owners as the mostly young visitors befoul the landscape, dirty the water and put themselves in danger taking photos on the edge of a 50-metre rock face, he said.

 “If they go over the edge, they won’t survive,” said Kronfeld, adding that visitors often drank alcohol at the pools, which increased the risk. “It’s amazing it hasn’t happened already.”

Kronfeld’s forebears bought the beachfront property in 1926 and it is split into three sections; the family maintains the plots themselves and keep modest beach houses on the land. All was peaceful until about five years ago, Kronfeld told the Guardian, when his property suddenly started to receive a lot of visitors.

“We couldn’t work out why so many people were coming,” he said. “Then someone said ‘It’s because the pools are all over the internet.’”

Finding the “secret” pools at Anawhata Beach has become a piece of online lore; directions are listed on tourist sites and Instagrammers who visit call it a “hidden gem” or “Auckland’s best kept secret”.

Others are more direct. “Def worth a trespass,” one woman on Instagram captioned her picture. “One of the nicer places I have urinated,” wrote a young man, below a photo of himself relaxing in one of the pools.

During summer, Kronfeld said, visitors number 30 to 40 a day. “I kicked 23 people out of the pools once,” he said, adding that some were angry when asked to leave, and on a couple of occasions, his relatives had almost come to blows with trespassers.

Newsroom, a New Zealand media outlet, recently set up a hidden camera by the pools to film those trespassing on Kronfeld’s property. As well as capturing dozens of topless – and occasionally bottomless – young people posing in the pools, and even couples having sex, the covert filming caught tourists visiting during New Zealand’s strict coronavirus lockdown. At that time, travelling further than one’s neighbourhood was banned.

 “A lot of these people aren’t even going to the beach,” Kronfeld said. “They just come up here to take a photo.”

Home-made signs warning trespassers to keep out “don’t last” he said, so Auckland Council had provided five sturdier notices, which are bolted to posts attached to the ground with concrete. Still the visitors come, leaving clothes, beer bottles, rubbish - and even, once, a whole gazebo.

But Kronfeld noticed that after the Newsroom article was published, photographs taken of his pools began to quietly disappear from Instagram. Notes have been added to some tourism websites that the pools are private property, and a couple of past visitors even emailed his family to apologise.

In turn, he wants tourists to know that there is a view “exactly the same” about 100 metres away from the cliff-top pools that they’re welcome to visit.

“Access is from the public track, so they don’t have to climb across anything,” he said. “It’s the same view, it just hasn’t got that pool.”

Kronfeld goes there himself to sit on a steel bench overlooking the ocean and watch the sunset, which he described as “pretty cool”. But he says he doesn’t get his phone out. He just looks.