Resources

New Zealand’s most fertile soils are found in the Canterbury Plains near Christchurch and the Southland-Otego alluvial plains at the southern end of the South Island. New Zealand has more than 3 billion tons of coal reserves and abundant offshore natural-gas reserves. The country is also rich in hydroelectric potential. It was thought to lack petroleum until 1988, when a field estimated to contain 40 million barrels of petroleum was discovered in the western part of the North Island. Other resources include geothermal energy, iron sands, and limestone.

New Zealand Cities

Auckland, the most northern of New Zealand’s four main cities, has the biggest population; almost one million people live there. It is the biggest city too; to get from one end of Auckland to the other one you need to travel fifty kilometers. Auckland has two harbours, the Manukau in the west and the Waitemata in the east; at the narrowest part it is only 1.5 kilometers from one to the other.

Auckland is a modern business center with many high-rise buildings. One-third of Auckland’s population come from islands in the Pacific, so Auckland has the biggest group of these people of any city in the world.

Sprawling between the two large harbours, Auckland has a lot of enthusiastic yachters who sail back, forth and around on weekends and make it look very picturesque – the city is nicknamed ‘the City of Sails’.

One of the most interesting places in Auckland is Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World and Antarctic Encounter. It is a unique aquarium housed in old storm water holding tanks. An acrylic tunnel runs through the aquarium and you travel through on a moving footpath, with the fish swimming all around you. You can step off at any time to take a better look and the whole place is designed to recreate the experience of scuba diving around the coast of New Zealand.

Windy Wellington at the southern end of the North Island is the capital of New Zealand and has a population of 325,000. Wellington is built on high hills around a lovely harbour, and has a lots of good shops, restaurants and theaters.

Three buildings from New Zealand’s parliamentary complex. By far the most distinctive and well known is the modernist building known as the Beehive – because that just what it looks like. Designed by British architect Sir Basil Spence, it was begun in 1969 and completed in 1980. this building houses the executive offices.

Next door, the Old Parliament Building, completed in 1922. Beside this, the neo-Gothic Parliamentary Library building is the oldest in the parliamentary complex.

Opposite the Beehive stands Old Government Building, one of the largest all-wooden buildings in the world – there’s a wooden temple in Japan which beats it for ‘the biggest’ honours.

Christchurch is the South Island’s city with 300,000 people. It is a flat, green place; one-third of the city is parks and gardens, gardens of geranium, chrysanthemums and carefully edged lawns where not a blade of grass is out of place. To many people Christchurch is ‘the most English city outside England’; it was designed in England, and its river is called the Avon. The name Christchurch comes from Christ Church College at Oxford, as one of the leaders of the early settlers was educated there. Even the central square is dominated by a neogothic cathedral in the fashion of English towns.

New Zealand’s fourth city has the old name for Edinburgh – Dunedin. In the nineteenth century it was the center of New Zealand’s business and its largest city. Many of Dunedin’s most beautiful buildings were built at this time. It also has New Zealand’s oldest university.

New Zealand’s parliamentary complex