New Zealand

New Zealand is a country made of islands.

It is far out in the Pacific Ocean. It has two big islands and many small ones. Its Māori name is Aotearoa. The capital city is Wellington.

New Zealand is an island country in the South Pacific Ocean, more than 1,600 kilometers southeast of Australia, its nearest neighbor. It has two main islands, the North Island and the South Island, and many smaller ones. Its Māori name is Aotearoa.

The country is about 1,600 kilometers long from north to south. Snowy mountains run along the South Island, and the North Island has active volcanoes. The capital, Wellington, and the biggest city, Auckland, are both on the North Island, where most people live.

New Zealand lies in the southwestern Pacific, the southwesternmost part of Polynesia and one of the last sizable lands on Earth to be settled by people. Britannica describes it as about 1,600 km long from north to south and about 450 km across at its widest point, with an extremely long coastline for its area because of its many harbors and fiords. It has two main islands, the North and South Islands, separated by Cook Strait, plus many smaller islands, some hundreds of kilometers from the main group.

The land area is about 268,000 square kilometers, and about two-thirds of it is economically useful; the rest is mountainous. New Zealand also administers Tokelau, while Niue and the Cook Islands are self-governing states in free association with it. Stats NZ estimated the population at 5,357,300 on 30 June 2026, with about three-fourths of people living on the North Island.

Auckland is the biggest city in New Zealand.

It sits between two harbors. A tall, thin tower rises over the city. Wellington is the capital city. It has a big national museum called Te Papa.

Auckland is New Zealand's biggest city and its largest port. It sits on a narrow strip of land between two harbors, and the Sky Tower, 328 meters tall, rises above it. Auckland was founded in 1840 as the capital, but in 1865 the government moved to Wellington.

Wellington, at the southern tip of the North Island, is the capital. It is built around a harbor, and much of the city stands on land reclaimed from the bay. Te Papa Tongarewa, the national museum, moved into its present building there in 1998. On the South Island lie Christchurch and Queenstown, a town on the shore of Lake Whakatipu.

Auckland, the most populous city and largest port, occupies a narrow isthmus between Waitematā Harbour on the Hauraki Gulf/Tīkapa Moana and Manukau Harbour. Governor William Hobson founded it in 1840 as the colonial capital; Britannica notes that it has the country's greatest concentration of Māori and large numbers of Polynesians from other Pacific islands, and that it produced about two-fifths of New Zealand's GDP in the early 2020s. The 328-meter Sky Tower opened there in 1997.

Wellington replaced Auckland as the seat of government in 1865. It lies in a fault zone on the shores and hills around Wellington Harbour, and much of the city is built on reclaimed land; its institutions include the Parliament buildings and Te Papa Tongarewa, the national museum, which moved into its present building in 1998 and describes itself as bicultural. Christchurch, in the middle of the South Island, was badly damaged by earthquakes in 2010 and 2011.

The South Island has tall, snowy mountains.

The tallest one is Aoraki, also called Mount Cook. Rivers of ice, called glaciers, slide down the mountains. The North Island has volcanoes and a big lake.

New Zealand sits on the Ring of Fire, where two of Earth's giant plates meet. Their pushing makes many earthquakes and lifted up the Southern Alps, a chain of mountains about 480 kilometers long. The highest peak, Aoraki/Mount Cook, is 3,724 meters tall, and more than 360 glaciers lie in these mountains.

In the southwest, glaciers carved deep valleys that the sea later flooded, making fiords such as Milford Sound. The North Island has active volcanoes, such as Mount Ruapehu, and Lake Taupō, the country's largest natural lake, which fills an old volcanic crater.

New Zealand is part of the circum-Pacific Ring of Fire. The North Island and the western South Island lie on the Indian-Australian Plate and the rest of the South Island on the Pacific Plate; the Alpine Fault marks their contact, which UNESCO calls one of only three segments of the world's major plate boundaries on land. Collision builds the Southern Alps/Kā Tiritiri o te Moana, which rise to nearly 4,000 m within 30 km of the sea. A 2013 GPS survey led by the University of Otago found that Aoraki/Mount Cook is 3,724 m high, 30 m lower than its old official height, and Land Information New Zealand said it would adopt the new figure.

Glaciation shaped Fiordland's 15 fiords; Milford Sound is a flooded glacial valley about 19 km long and up to 512 m deep. The North Island's Volcanic Plateau holds Mount Ruapehu and Lake Taupō, a caldera created by cataclysmic eruptions some 1,800 years ago. Mean annual rainfall ranges from about 300 mm in Central Otago to as much as 6,400 mm in the Southern Alps.

Many birds in New Zealand cannot fly.

The kiwi has fluffy, hair-like feathers and no tail. The kākāpō is a big green parrot that walks. A reptile called the tuatara lives on a few islands.

New Zealand was cut off from other lands for a very long time, so many of its plants and animals live nowhere else. When the first people arrived, they found few animals besides birds: lizards, tuatara, a few frogs and two kinds of bats. With no predators to hunt them, birds thrived, and many are flightless.

The kiwi cannot fly and has loose, hair-like feathers, strong legs and no tail; it is a national icon. The kākāpō is a large, green, flightless parrot that is active at night, and only 325 are alive today. The tuatara, the country's largest reptile, now lives in the wild only on 32 islands. In the wild southwest live the kea, an alpine parrot, and the takahē, a rare flightless bird.

Long isolation gave New Zealand a distinctive biota: Britannica reports that almost nine-tenths of its indigenous plants are found nowhere else. When people arrived there were few animals besides birds: skinks, geckos, tuatara, a few frogs and two species of bats. Several species of moa, large flightless birds, are now extinct. Britannica also notes that introduced red deer and Australian possums have greatly damaged high-country bush, and that controlling goats, deer, possums and rabbits, even in national parks, is a continuing problem.

The Department of Conservation lists five kiwi species and describes the kākāpō as a nocturnal, flightless parrot, the heaviest parrot species (males up to 4 kg), with 325 birds alive, all on predator-free islands and in a fenced sanctuary. The tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) is the only surviving member of the order Sphenodontia, which flourished about 200 million years ago; rats are considered the most serious threat to it. UNESCO's Te Wāhipounamu site in the southwest is home to the kea, which it calls the only alpine parrot in the world, and to the endangered takahē.

About 5 million people live in New Zealand.

Most people speak English. Many people also speak Māori, called te reo Māori. Sign language is an official language too. Groups sing and dance together in kapa haka.

About 5.36 million people lived in New Zealand in 2026. Most have European roots, and the Māori, the Indigenous people of New Zealand, are a significant minority. Many families also came from Pacific islands such as Samoa, and from Asia.

New Zealand has three official languages: English, Māori (te reo Māori) and New Zealand Sign Language. Te reo Māori became official in 1987. Māori Language Week grew from Māori Language Day: 14 September 1972, when a petition asking for te reo to be taught in schools reached parliament. Kapa haka groups perform Māori songs and dances, and a hāngī is a Māori feast of meat, seafood and vegetables steamed for hours in an earth oven.

Britannica describes a majority of European origin, a significant Māori minority (about one-sixth of the population in the early 21st century) and smaller numbers of people from the Pacific islands and Asia, with Asians the fastest-growing group. English, Māori and New Zealand Sign Language are official; Samoan, Hindi and Mandarin Chinese are also widely spoken. Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, the Māori Language Commission, says that for most of the 20th century the government discouraged and even banned speaking te reo. A 1972 petition with more than 30,000 signatures led to Māori Language Day, later Māori Language Week; the WAI11 claim to the Waitangi Tribunal led to the Māori Language Act 1987, which made te reo official, and the Commission works toward a goal of 1 million speakers by 2040.

Since the 1950s a Māori cultural renaissance has revived wood carving, weaving and carved meeting houses (whare whakairo); the biennial Te Matatini festival, first held in 1972, ends in a national kapa haka championship. Waitangi Day, 6 February, is the national day. At the 2023 Census, Stats NZ found for the first time that over half of people (51.6 percent) had no religion; 32.3 percent were Christian, the largest religious grouping.