The total land area of New Zealand is approximately 268,670 sq kilometres (Great Britain is 209,331 sq km)
There are only 4.5 million inhabitants (63 million in Great Britain). To be more exact, according to NZ Government statistics the population at NZ time 9.12.19am on Friday 24 Jan 2014 was 4,508,408, and increasing by one person every 7 minutes 42 seconds.
It is thought the first human settlors arrived in about 1200AD and came from Polynesia by canoe
It was a Dutchman, Abel Tasman, who was the first European to discover this southern land in 1642 but he did not stay after one of his small boats was intercepted by a Maori war canoe
In 1769 the explorer James Cook, from Yorkshire, England, arrived in his ship 'The Endeavour' and in the course of 3 visits between then and 1777 sailed around both islands
It was after the arrival of Cook that the native settlors started referring to themselves as 'Maoris'
The official languages are English and Maori
The capital is Wellington, which is the third largest city (Auckland is the biggest and Christchurch next)
Wellington sits at latitude 41 degrees south as do places in Argentina and Chile but the climate in Wellington is more temperate because of the surrounding sea
New Zealanders drive on the left.
It is a nuclear free zone
In 1893 it was the first country in the world to give women full rights to vote
In 1947 it became independent from Great Britain
It has no snakes and only a few rare poisonous spiders but...
is at the point where 2 tectonic plates (the Pacific and the Australian) meet and has active volcanoes and an average of 14,000 earthquakes a year.
Christchurch on South Island was devastated, and is still recovering from, two large quakes and their aftershocks which occurred in 2010 (7.1 magnitude) and 2011 (2 of 6.3 magnitude). As a result many people have moved from the city permanently to other parts of the country.
(Thanks to The Rough Guide to New Zealand, Eighth edition published September 2012 for some of these facts)
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