The secondary school pupils were yesterday handed football jerseys signed by Spanish football super-team Real Madrid.
Those signatures are from the whole team, including Croatian midfielder Luka Modric, the Fifa world player of the year, and Welsh forward Gareth Bale.
Former John McGlashan College Spanish teacher Amadeo Enriquez-Ballestero - now at Kavanagh College - is in charge of the exchange programme.
He can boast a very useful link with the football team: his father works as a contractor for the club.
That helped get the eight pupils from John McGlashan, Kavanagh and Columba Colleges a tour of the club's training facility, Real Madrid City, and the signed clothing, one example of which was presented to John McGlashan in a frame at an assembly yesterday.
Mr Enriquez-Ballestero said Spanish was "quite a big language at the moment - it's being taught in many schools''.
The exchange programme was open to any school interested.
The shirts were "just a very lucky thing that we were able to get''.
To have them signed by the whole team was "very unusual''.
"You can imagine they are really busy. No-one can ever see the actual players, but I guess we just spoke to the right person at the right time, and it happened.''
The presentation of the jerseys also marked the beginning of Real Madrid's most distant official supporters' club, in Dunedin.
Pupil Krishan Luxmanan, who went on an exchange visit to Madrid last year, said while he was first and foremost a cricket fan, getting his shirt was "a bit of a brag with the mates''.
A tour of Real Madrid City was a highlight of his trip, and meeting future stars there "really cool''.
The shirts were a good memory of the trip.
