It is on the banks of the Clutha River at the confluence of the Manuherikia River , on State Highway 8 , kilometres mi by road from Dunedin and 33 kilometres 21 mi 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. The town of Alexandra is home to 6, people as of June The town was founded during the Otago gold rush in the s, and was named after Alexandra of Denmark by John Aitken Connell who surveyed the town.
In a two-month period in , 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.
Conditions were uninviting initially with a lack of food, equipment and wood. In , there were 37 men who drowned in the Clutha river or its tributaries. Of these, 12 could not be named. At this stage, stone fruit orchards gradually took over the local economy.
When the river had run out of gold, the river banks were dredged. This continued day and night between and and again between and If the dredging hit hard rock, it interrupted the power supply to Alexandra and the lights of the entire town dimmed.
