Alexandra (Māori: Manuherikia or Areketanara) is a town in the Central Otago district of the South Island of New Zealand. It is on the banks of the Clutha River (at the confluence of the Manuherikia River), on State Highway 8, by road from Dunedin and south of Cromwell. The nearest towns to Alexandra via state highway 8 are Clyde seven kilometres to the northwest and Roxburgh forty kilometres to the south. State highway 85 also connects Alexandra to Omakau, Lauder, Oturehua, Ranfurly and on to Palmerston on the East Otago coast.
The town of Alexandra is home to people as of
History
The town was founded during the Otago gold rush in the 1860s, and was named after Alexandra of Denmark by John Aitken Connell who surveyed the town. In a two-month period in 1862, two gold miners called Horatio Hartley and Christopher Reilly collected 34 kilograms of gold from the Cromwell Gorge, Hartley and Reilly travelled together to New Zealand after meeting in the Californian gold rush. They initially worked in secret to obtain as much gold as they could along the Cromwell gorge. In order to obtain the government's reward on offer for gold discoveries, they made the site public.
This made the Clutha River and its tributaries famous for their gold. In a short time, 2000 miners had descended on Alexandra. Conditions were uninviting initially with a lack of food, equipment and wood. In the 1870s, Chinese miners moved in to re-work claims that others had sold on. By 1889, most of the easy to access gold had been mined and leases were sold for virtually nothing. At this stage, stone fruit orchards gradually took over the local economy. The noise was ever present and loud and it also produced significant quantities of dust which plagued Alexandra. If the dredging hit hard rock, it interrupted the power supply to Alexandra and the lights of the entire town dimmed. As a result of this event, the Alexandra suspension bridge was constructed between 1879 and 1882 after the bridge at Clyde failed in the 1878 flood. The Otago Central Railway line from Dunedin into Central Otago reached Alexandra in December 1906.
Originally referred to as "Alexandra South" to distinguish it from a North Island town with the same name, the word "South" was dropped in 1867 after the North Island town was renamed to Pirongia. It was known to miners of the day by several names: the "Lower Township", the "Junction Township", and "Manuherikia". The hottest and coldest temperatures recorded in Alexandra (between 1971 and 2019) are (recorded on 5 February 2005 and 30 January 2018) and respectively.
During times of high pressure, temperature inversions can form, keeping temperatures in Alexandra below freezing all day.
Alexandra is one of the driest places in the country, often recording fewer than of rain each year, the majority of which falls in the summer half of the year. The town hold the New Zealand record for the lowest rainfall in one calendar year, recording just in 1964.
Demography
thumb|War Memorial on Tarbert Street in Alexandra, New Zealand
Alexandra's population was 1414 residents in 1951 and this had increased to 1823 residents in 1956 and then to 2292 residents in 1961.
Alexandra is described by Statistics New Zealand as a small urban area, and covers . It had an estimated population of as of with a population density of people per km<sup>2</sup>. It is the seventh-largest urban area in Otago, and the second-largest urban area in the Central Otago District behind Cromwell.