John Steinbeck's Salinas Valley, with its waist-high grasses and dramatic mountain backdrop, no longer exists in California — a century of development saw to that. So when Netflix adapted East of Eden into a series starring Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames and Christopher Abbott as settler Adam Trask, the production headed somewhere else entirely: the South Island of New Zealand, roughly as far from the US as you can get.
Production designer Grant Major — who worked on The Lord of the Rings and Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog — says the country's untouched terrain makes an easy stand-in for a bygone American West. He even reused a farm from The Power of the Dog for this shoot. Three locations did the heavy lifting, and all three are well worth a detour if you're travelling in Otago or Auckland.
The Trask farm sits in the foothills of the Hawkdun Range in Central Otago, a dry, high-country district that echoes the water-starved farmland of Steinbeck's opening chapters. Major's team needed almost nothing digitally altered — the grass really does reach your waist, and you really do have to wade through it. The area is remote ranching country, popular with cyclists tackling the Otago Central Rail Trail and drivers taking the scenic route between Central Otago's towns.
For the town of Salinas itself, the production landed on Oamaru, a coastal town of just under 15,000 people. Its claim to fame is a remarkably preserved Victorian precinct built from local limestone in the late 1800s, when the port was shipping goods worldwide. The team got period-perfect streetscapes, a working railway and even a steam engine — everything, Major notes, except the brothels. Today Oamaru leans into its heritage with galleries, craft stores and its famously quirky steampunk scene, plus a blue penguin colony at the harbour.
Those brothels, and the grand parlour interiors, were built on sets in Auckland, where the crew also found a crumbling old wooden mansion for exterior and interior shots. It's no surprise: Auckland holds one of the world's largest collections of wooden Victorian houses, from ornate bay villas to sprawling estates, many still standing in inner suburbs like Ponsonby and Devonport.
For travellers, this is a handy itinerary in miniature: high-country landscapes, a limestone Victorian port town and Auckland's heritage architecture, all linked by one production. Film-location tourism is well established in New Zealand — Campion's The Power of the Dog sent visitors to the same Otago backcountry — and the South Island's dry interior is far less crowded than the lakes-and-fiords circuit. Oamaru in particular rewards a slow stop: it's compact, walkable and sits on the Coastal Classic train route between Christchurch and Dunedin.
If the series sparks your interest, base yourself in Cromwell or Alexandra for the Hawkdun foothills, give Oamaru a night or two, and finish in Auckland for the Victorian villas and city comforts.
