Mitad del Mundo

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The monolith with the globe of Mitad del Mundo

La Mitad del Mundo ( Spanish : The Middle of the World) is an equatorial monument in San Antonio de Pichincha in the Ecuadorian province of Pichincha .

The monument is about 23 kilometers north of the capital Quito and marks the place where Charles Marie de La Condamine, with a French expedition in 1736, was the first European to determine an exact position of the equator (240 m).

The center of the monument is a large sphere (4.5 m in diameter) on a monolith with a metal ring around it. This is supposed to symbolize the earth and the equator. The structure can be climbed and is about 30 meters high. The sides of the monolith point in the four cardinal directions . In the east and west direction of the structure there is a yellow line that runs through the entire complex and is supposed to lie exactly on the equator (but it does not).

The monolith forms the center of a park that is modeled on a typical colonial village and is called Ciudad Mitad del Mundo (Spanish: city in the middle of the world) . In the buildings of the village there are exhibitions, a planetarium , restaurants and tourist shops, where you can also purchase equator certificates.

Emergence

Ecuador is the only area in South America where the equator runs along fixed, natural landmarks: the peaks of the Andes . The rest of the route goes through constantly changing rainforest areas . Fixed points are necessary, however, in order to observe the orbits of the heavenly bodies . The area of ​​today's Ecuador is therefore the only place where it was previously possible to determine the exact position of the equator. The 30-meter-high monument and the little houses grouped around it on the excursion site were built between 1979 and 1982.

Modern knowledge

Image of the equator on the GPS near Quito, Ecuador (in the "Position" section)

In the days of GPS it turned out that the true equator is about 240 m north of the monument. All visitors who stand with their legs apart every day over the yellow line at the monument to stand on both halves of the earth are in reality with both legs about 240 m far on the southern hemisphere.

Purely by chance, however, discovered a paraglider near the Mitad del Mundo on the mountain Catequilla the remains of a building from the pre-Inca , which is to mark the equator and more accurately, established over 1,000 years ago. The Quitsato project aims to research this find and is presenting its results in a pavilion in the Ciudad Mitad del Mundo . Quitsato sees the complex on the Catequilla as the center of several distributed structures in the vicinity, which reflect various properties of the sun and earth orbit.

In 2006/2007 Quitsato built a sundial with a diameter of 54 m and a towering cylindrical column as a gnomon right on the equator near the Panamericana . The graphics embedded in the floor allow reading of the time and year. A survey mark shows the point in the ground where the Ecuadorian Military Geographic Institute has determined the equator there with an accuracy of 1 mm.

literature

  • Barbara Fischer: Mitad del Mundo, the only true center of the earth . In: Diess .: Mitad del Mundo. Ecuador and Galapagos to touch . Laudation-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 2009, p. 17, ISBN 978-3-941275-13-3 .

Web links

Commons : Mitad del Mundo  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikivoyage: Mitad del Mundo  - travel guide

Individual evidence

  1. http://www.quitsato.org Website project Quitsato. Retrieved August 15, 2015.
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osCikAAoGrg Pablo Pascual: Quitsato, youtube Video (18:57) April 13, 2012. Retrieved August 15, 2015.

Coordinates: 0 ° 0 ′ 7.8 ″  S , 78 ° 27 ′ 21.3 ″  W.