It is administered by the West Coast Regional Council, and is known co-officially as Te Tai Poutini.

First settled by Kāi Tahu in approximately 1200 AD, the area was famous across New Zealand for its richness in pounamu greenstone.

[8] After the arrival of Europeans, the region became famed for its vast and mostly untapped gold reserves, which historically had not been highly valued.

The region was also heavily sought after by nuclear weapons states in the 1950s for its abundant resources of uranium, which many West Coasters found objectionable.

It is divided into the three local government districts of (from north to south) Buller, Grey and Westland.

It is the only part of New Zealand where significant tracts of lowland forest remain: elsewhere, for instance on the Canterbury Plains and in the Firth of Thames, they have been almost completely destroyed for settlement and agriculture.

Scenic areas include the Haast Pass, Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers, Hokitika Gorge, Lake Brunner, the Pancake Rocks at Punakaiki, the Oparara Arches and the Heaphy Track.

The region has very high rainfall due to the prevailing northwesterly wind pattern and the location of the Southern Alps, which give rise to heavy orographic precipitation.

The rain shadow effect is responsible for the relatively arid climate of the Canterbury Plains on the other side of the Southern Alps.

The region is home to Ngāi Tahu, who value it for the greenstone (pounamu) found there in abundance.

The region was only occasionally visited by Europeans until the discovery of gold near the Taramakau River in 1864 by two Māori, Ihaia Tainui and Haimona Taukau.

By the end of the year there were an estimated 1800 prospectors, many of them around the Hokitika area, which in 1866 was briefly the most populous settlement in New Zealand.

The West Coast gold rush between 1864 and 1867 created numerous gold rush towns such as Ōkārito, which at one time was the largest town on the West Coast but quickly almost vanished as miners moved on.

The cows produced 50,700 tonnes of milk solids, worth $365 million at the national average farmgate price ($7.20 per kg).

[22] Other industries are the manufacturing and sales of greenstone jewellery, sphagnum moss gathering and stone-collection for garden landscaping.

[23] The region has the only New Zealand nesting place of the kōtuku (white heron), at the Waitangiroto Nature Reserve, visited by tours from the small farming township of Whataroa.

It connects to the Tasman District in the north through the Buller Gorge, and to Otago in the south via Haast Pass.

The TranzAlpine train service runs return between Christchurch and Greymouth daily and freight lines extend to Ngākawau and Hokitika.