At the upper end of the North Island lies New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. The port city is located on a 380 km long and up to 80 km wide ◼isthmus between the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
An isthmus is the narrowest point of a land bridge, which is bounded on both sides by water and connects two larger land masses. As counterpart to the isthmus is the strait, a place of a sea, at which two land masses come close together and form a bottleneck of the sea.
Around 1.5 million of the 4.8 million New Zealanders live in Auckland. Nevertheless, Wellington is the ◼capital of the oceanic country with more than a million fewer residents.
New Zealand has had three different capitals in its history. The first capital was Old Russell (Okiato) from 1840 to 1841, and Auckland from 1841 to 1865.
Since 1865, the capital of New Zealand is the at the south-western tip of the North Island located city of Wellington. It is the southernmost capital of a sovereign country and holds the record as windiest city with an average wind speed of over 26 km/h.
