In my original Spanish classes in Christchurch, "New Zealand" was Nueva Zelanda.  However upon arriving in Buenos Aires, I found that everyone (shop assistants, taxi drivers, people in milongas) corrected me - it's meant to be Nueva Zelandia - i.e. with an i.

I was happy to stand corrected, and announce myself as being from Nueva Zelandia forthwith, until I found other people who corrected me back to Nueva Zelanda.

To resolve the issue I decided to resort to 'official' channels, and looked up the name of the New Zealand Embassy in various places, only to find frustratingly that both spellings exist (even within the same publication).

Buenos Aires town planners also have a tendency to name streets after (among other things, like generals, names of battles, etc.) countries, and there is indeed a "New Zealand" street.  So I duly looked up the map books, to find again that some say Nueva Zelanda and others Nueva Zelandia.

After some discussion with Ceci and a comparison of other examples (Irlanda, Holanda, Islandia, Finlandia, Disneylandia), I decided to run with Zelanda and be done.

However, as we recently visited the cemetery in Chacarita, which is where New Zealand Street is, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and go see for myself what the Buenos Aires Government thought the spelling might be when putting it in big white letters for all to see.  Surely, I thought, I could trust the authority of a body charged with giving things their official names.  After constant consultation of the map to navigate the labyrinthine streets around the cemetery and railway, we finally arrived at New Zealand Street, which turns out to be a tiny little pasaje that's only one block long.

And at one end of the block, it's spelt one way, and at the other end, the other.

Ceci's dad suggested that the best way to settle the debate once and for all would be to find the origins of the name.

In NZ Ceci had given me a book that includes copies of old maps, and I found the earliest version of a New Zealand map, which features only a snippet of the coastline. And there I discovered that this problem of the name of the country dates back a long way before my arrival in Argentina; right there, on the same page, it's spelt both ways - one in the heading, and the other on the map.  So at this stage I'll leave the debate for more learned personages...