Spain, meet
New Zealand.

Turn New Zealand upside down, carry it halfway round the world, and it comes down on Spain. The North Island covers the middle of the country. Auckland lands in the hills near Ronda, 5 km from Setenil de las Bodegas; Hamilton in the Córdoba countryside; Tauranga beside Los Villares, just outside Jaén; Palmerston North at San Martín de Valdeiglesias, west of Madrid; Napier and Hastings in La Mancha; and Wellington on the plains of Castile and León, 2 km from Alaejos. Madrid itself faces the Tararua District near the village of Weber, 29 km from Dannevirke.

The top of the South Island reaches the north-west corner of Iberia. Nelson lands by Mogadouro, in Portugal; Blenheim a few hundred metres from Villalcampo in Zamora; Christchurch on the coast of Lugo near Foz; and the West Coast towns, Greymouth and Hokitika, along the Galician rías. Northland crosses the Strait of Gibraltar: Tangier’s other slice lands 2 km from Maungatapere, just west of Whangārei. And the Chatham Islands, far out in the Pacific, have their twin in the Cévennes in southern France, next to Le Vigan.

The misses matter as much. The south of the South Island, Dunedin, Queenstown and Invercargill, faces the open Atlantic off Galicia. In Spain, the Mediterranean coast from Barcelona to Almería, the Basque Country, Cantabria and the Balearic Islands all face open Pacific east of New Zealand, and the Canaries face the ocean west of Norfolk Island. Most of Portugal, Lisbon and Porto included, faces the Tasman Sea just west of New Zealand; only the north-east interior, from Bragança down to Guarda, has land opposite. From Barcelona the nearest exact spot is not in Spain at all: it is 287 km away in France, on the Chathams’ twin.

Every Spanish city above 150,000 people and every provincial capital, every district capital in mainland Portugal, the big cities of northern Morocco, and every New Zealand town above 10,000 people or with a regional council’s seat. Exact means land opposite land. Where the other slice would get wet, the table gives the nearest spot from which an exact sandwich is possible. Every place links to the map, where you can move the bread around until both ends are dry.

Some towns have a twin: another town whose centre is less than a kilometre from their exact antipode. Put bread in the middle of one and bread in the middle of the other and you have an exact Earth sandwich, the best grade there is, without leaving either town. Most of them pair the south of the North Island, from the Kāpiti Coast and the Hutt Valley to the Wairarapa, with the villages of Castile and León.

1. WoodvilleManawatū-Whanganui⇄VillamantillaCommunity of Madrid318 m
2. MastertonWellington⇄MarazolejaCastile and León334 m
3. RapauraMarlborough⇄Moral de SayagoCastile and León395 m
4. WaikanaeWellington⇄Collado de ContrerasCastile and León484 m
5. Foxton BeachManawatū-Whanganui⇄NavalmoralCastile and León535 m
6. GreytownWellington⇄Aldeanueva del CodonalCastile and León560 m
7. WainuiomataWellington⇄Nueva Villa de las TorresCastile and León582 m
8. NewtownWellington⇄AlaejosCastile and León595 m
9. HuntlyWaikato⇄SantaellaAndalusia625 m
10. ShannonManawatū-Whanganui⇄Santa Cruz de PinaresCastile and León626 m
11. BlenheimMarlborough⇄VillalcampoCastile and León699 m
12. MangoreiTaranaki⇄MiajadasExtremadura726 m
13. Windsor ParkAuckland⇄MontejaqueAndalusia763 m

Distances are between the centre points GeoNames gives for each town. Sandwich Law measures from where the bread actually lies, plus both phones’ GPS accuracy, so check your two spots on the map before the day.

A sandwich’s elevation bonus is the height of one end plus the height of the other (Sandwich Law § 1.4). The Board scores it the way the map shows it: from the average height of the ground over cells about 20 km across. Every spot in a cell scores the same, so you don’t have to stand on the summit, only in the right cell. These are the corridor’s best cells, one per area, each with dry land at both ends.

1. +2,720 m7 km from Lubián (Castile and León)cell average 1,480 m52 km from Hanmer Springs (Canterbury)cell average 1,240 m
2. +2,080 m14 km from Fuencaliente (Castile-La Mancha)cell average 840 m35 km from Tūrangi (Waikato)cell average 1,240 m
3. +2,000 m5 km from Nerpio (Castile-La Mancha)cell average 1,400 m38 km from Ōpōtiki (Bay of Plenty)cell average 600 m
4. +1,920 m2 km from Ojos-Albos (Castile and León)cell average 1,240 m18 km from Shannon (Manawatū-Whanganui)cell average 680 m
5. +1,760 m6 km from Taboada (Galicia)cell average 680 m62 km from Hanmer Springs (Canterbury)cell average 1,080 m

The top one pairs the mountains of Sanabria, where Zamora meets Galicia and Portugal, with the high country north-east of Hanmer Springs. Both ends are mountain country: plan the access as carefully as the timing.

The window. Both slices must go down within five minutes of the same UTC instant (Sandwich Law § 2.1). The sandwich lobby holds you to it: when the first slice lands, the other side has five minutes.

The clocks. New Zealand is 10 hours ahead of Spain from early April to late September, 12 hours ahead from late October to late March, and 11 hours ahead for the few weeks in between, when one country has changed its clocks and the other has not. Portugal is an hour behind Spain. So 9 pm in Madrid in January is 9 am the next morning in Wellington.

The light. Two exactly opposite points are never in daylight together: sunrise at one end is sunset at the other. The atmosphere bends a little sunlight over the horizon, though, so for eight to ten minutes twice a day, on a clear flat horizon, the sun is up at both ends at once. The evening one is the last few minutes before sunset in Spain, which are the first few minutes after sunrise in New Zealand. Put the bread down then and both photographs get golden light. At any other time one of you is in the dark: bring a torch.

The seasons. Opposite too. Midsummer in Spain is midwinter in New Zealand, when the hill country can be cold and muddy, and Christmas is a summer holiday in Auckland while the meseta frosts over. Spring and autumn are the kindest to both ends.

The geometry is the easy part. The hard part is a person at the other end, and the site does not match strangers. Ways people have found one:

• Ask online, in the other side’s language. The sandwich that made the news in 2020 began with a post on a Spanish-language forum on Reddit. A short message in Spanish (or Portuguese) and English, with your town and its twin, goes a long way.
• Start from a twin. A small Spanish village rarely hears from New Zealand. The ayuntamiento (town hall), a local association or a community page is a reasonable first letter; so is a New Zealand town’s community noticeboard.
• Look for travellers. Spaniards living in New Zealand and New Zealanders living in Spain already have a foot on each side, and a friend at home on the other.

Then open an attempt in the sandwich lobby. It gives you a code and a link to send through whatever channel you already share, shows both slices when they arrive, and runs the five-minute window. Much of the exact zone on both sides is farmland, so put the bread on public ground, a verge, a square or a park, or ask whoever owns the field. The exact grade allows a kilometre of slack, which is usually enough to find somewhere.

This is where Earth sandwiches began. Ze Frank set the challenge on his video blog on 16 May 2006, and it was answered that year with bread in Spain and bread in New Zealand. The most reported one since came in January 2020, when an Auckland student and a chef from Ronda, who had found each other on Reddit, put bread down on Bucklands Beach in Auckland and a few kilometres from Ronda, after two months of planning and one failed attempt (ITV News). Both came before the Board, which lists the sandwiches verified since.

Casablanca · Madrid · Barcelona · Rabat · Auckland · Fes · Tangier