| Moana Pool | |||||||||||
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Moana Pool main entrance |
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| City: | Dunedin, New Zealand | ||||||||||
| Built: | 1960s | ||||||||||
| Opened: | 14 November 1964 | ||||||||||
| Architect(s): | Bill Hesson and Ian Ballantyne (Dunedin City Council) | ||||||||||
| Pools | |||||||||||
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Moana Pool is the largest swimming pool in the southern half of New Zealand's South Island. It is located at the corner of Littlebourne Road and Upper Stuart Street close to Otago Boys' High School, on the slopes of Roslyn, overlooking the centre of the city of Dunedin.
The largest of Dunedin's four public pools, Moana Pool was built in the early 1960s on the site of the old Moana Tennis Club.[1] Its name (the Māori word for "sea") is thus only coincidentally related to the pool's facilities. It was opened on 14 November 1964.
Costing 450,000 pounds, the pool was a replacement for the 1914 tepid pools in Lower Moray Place, which were seen as being inadequate for the city's modern needs. The new pool was designed by architect Bill Hesson and Ian Ballantyne of the Dunedin City Council engineers department.[1]
The main pool is of Olympic dimensions (50m by 17.5m), and is kept heated to 28.5 degrees celsius. It can be divided by a moveable bulkhead into two 25m pools. The Moana Pool complex was expanded in 2000-2001, and now includes a leisure and wave complex, two waterslides, a learner's pool (completed in 1965), a lap pool, and Olympic standard diving facilities.
Moana Pool has been used for regional and national championships in swimming, diving, and water polo, and is a regular host of the New Zealand Masters' Games, which are held in Dunedin every two years.
Two of the pools within the Moana Pool complex were renamed in November 2010 to honour double-Olympic gold medallist Danyon Loader and noted coach Duncan Laing, who spent much of their careers training and working at Moana Pool.