WHAT IS MITAD DEL MUNDO MONUMENT

What is Mitad del Mundo Monument

What is Mitad del Mundo Monument: Mitad del Mundo City is a cute museum park at the equator line featuring a 1736 French Geodesic study. Getting there and what to do.

 

Carried out by the French Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the Spanish government, the objective was to prove the flattening of the poles by measuring the earth at a location near the equator and another meridian in Sweden. Unfortunately, the mission did not leave a measuring mark in the field. In 1936, geographer Luis Tufiño measured with the equipment available at the time, the location of the equator and erected a small monument at a distance of about 25km from the center of Quito. In reality, the location was about 240m south of the equator set by the World Geodetic System WGS84. As the original landmark had already become rather famous, the province of Pichincha constructed a museum park, which was inaugurated in 1982, in which the original monument was replaced by a 30 m high monument with a 4.5 m globe on the top and an overlook with a spectacular view over the valley. The older monument was moved to Calacalí, a small town 7 km away.

 

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In its interior, the monument houses the modest but charming Ethnographic Museum Mitad del Mundo featuring objects and scenes of activities of the indigenous cultures of Ecuador. On weekends, musical and cultural events are organized for tourists under a roofed but open plaza surrounded by restaurants and art shops in a colonial style complex. A yellow line runs from the monument to the plaza, suggesting to be the equator where tourists have had their pictures taken, supposedly with one foot on the Northern and the other foot on the Southern Hemisphere.

 

The park also has some other attractions, such as a small planetarium, center displaying the geodesic mission, a miniature model of Quito and an art display about the artist Guyasamin. Tour guides often perform tricks that supposedly only work on the equator, such as water flowing both counter-clockwise and clockwise, balancing eggs on end, etc., but in reality they are mere tricks un-related to being on or near the equator.

About 200 m northeast of the park is a small private attraction, the Intiñan Solar Museum, supposedly on the real equator, but that still is about 40 m off.