#Boozy tourists risk their lives for Instagram glory in infinity pools

Anawhata Beach in Auckland, New Zealand.
Alamy Stock Photo

Social-media meatheads are risking their lives — and legal repercussions — to score the perfect Instagram shot at a precarious and private photo op in New Zealand.

Anawhata Beach is a remote, picturesque location some 30 miles outside the city of Auckland, and increasingly, trespassers are ignoring “private property” signs to pose at the edge of the site’s 54-yard-high cliff.

“We’ve absolutely had enough,” Buzz Kronfeld, a member of a family which has owned land at Anawhata Beach since 1926, tells The Guardian.

To add injury to insult, many of those who come to the pristine site seeking the perfect shot will drink while exploring its natural infinity pools, convincing Kronfeld an accident or death is inevitable.

“If they go over the edge, they won’t survive,” he says. “It’s amazing it hasn’t happened already.”

Kronfeld’s family, which keeps beach homes on the land, say the area was peaceful until roughly five years ago, The Guardian reports. Then, suddenly, there was an influx of unwanted visitors after the beach’s “secret” pools began surfacing online and being heralded as hidden gems and “Auckland’s best-kept secret.”

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

Now, in the summer, he says some 30 to 40 people a day come by to get their own shot of the area, as well as peeing, having sex in and leaving their trash around the pools while they’re there. In a single day, Kronfeld kicked out 23 people from the pools at the same time.

Despite the fact that they’re aware they’re trespassing, many visitors feel entitled to the space and get angry when asked to leave, he says, with fights between trespassers and family members often just barely avoided.

As homemade signs “don’t last,” the Auckland Council has supplied the owners with hardier warnings that are now bolted down in the area.