Located in the Southern Hemisphere, southeast of Australia, New Zealand is an island country in the Southern Pacific Ocean, consisting of two large and more than 700 smaller islands.
More than 90% of the country’s population lives on the North Island, where the capital city of Wellington is located.
The name New Zealand comes from Zeeland, a Dutch region meaning sea country or sea region in Dutch.
The name of the country is Maori, Aotearoa. Aotearoa means land of tall white clouds.
The island, where the Polynesian Maoris began to settle at the end of the 1200s, was discovered by the Dutchman Abel Tasman in 1642.
After Tasman, British explorer James Cook made four trips to the island between 1769 and 1779 and named it New Zealand.
The country, which has a highly developed free market economy, ranks first in the world in terms of welfare and human development level.
New Zealand, governed by a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, is a member of the British Commonwealth. Therefore, the head of state is the British monarch.
Five major ethnic groups live in New Zealand. These are Europeans, Maoris, Chinese, Samoans and Indians.
30% of the country is covered with forests and approximately one third of the country’s territory is protected by National Parks.
New Zealanders refer to themselves as the ‘kiwi’, a flightless bird. The kiwi bird is also the national symbol of the country.
New Zealand, one of the countries where The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies were shot, is the only country that has the right to put images of The Hobbit into its currency.
Geographically, it is almost the same size as Japan, with a population of about 5 million.
In the underpopulated country, the animal population is about twenty times the number of humans.
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