New Caledonia New Caledonia New Caledonia (; ) is a special collectivity of France in the southwest Pacific Ocean, east of Australia and from Metropolitan France. The archipelago, part of the Melanesia subregion, includes the main island of Grande Terre, the Loyalty Islands, the Chesterfield Islands, the Belep archipelago, the Isle of Pines, and a few remote islets. The Chesterfield Islands are in the Coral Sea. Locals refer to Grande Terre as "" ("the pebble"). New Caledonia has a land area of . Its population of 268,767 (August 2014 census) consists of a mix of Kanak people (the original inhabitants of New
Geography of New Caledonia the vast majority, some 93%, submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean. This viewpoint is not universal. Bernard Pelletier argues that Grande Terre was completely submerged for millions of years, and hence the origin of the flora may not be local in nature, but due to long distance-dispersal. Zealandia is in area, larger than Greenland or India, and almost half the size of Australia. It is unusually slender, stretching from New Caledonia in the north to beyond New Zealand's subantarctic islands in the south (from latitude 19° south to 56° south, analogous to ranging from Haiti to Hudson Bay or from Sudan