2023-08-25 13:04:19
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Caption,
The Middle of the World Monument is one of the most characteristic tourist places in Quito.
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After many years of living in Ecuador* I decided that it was time to visit the Equator line, but the task was more complicated than I expected since in half of the world there is more than one half of the world.
The result was that, in 72 hours of frantic searching, I ended up crossing from the northern to the southern hemisphere at five different monuments.
Everything should have started and ended in the same place: the Middle of the World City, located 13.5 kilometers north of Quito, in the town of San Antonio de Pichincha, where the gigantic monument visited annually by thousands of tourists who they take the classic photograph with one foot in each hemisphere, in a sort of equinoctial hopscotch.
While my young guide with a marked Quito accent told me regarding the French pavilion, the planetarium, the insectarium, and the “stick” where the Sun rests without leaving a shadow on March 21 and September 23, I had no better idea than to ask him if the equatorial line really passed exactly there.
Image source Matías Zibell – BBC
Caption,
Not so crowded monument in Calcalí, on the outskirts of Quito.
“No, it is located 240 meters to the north via Calacalí. Because before we did not have the technology that we have now. Our inhabitants did say that it was further north because they knew their lands, but the French with the technology said no, that it is here, that’s why we built the monument here”.
The “French” are, or were, the members of the geodesic mission that arrived in these latitudes in 1736 to measure the length of a meridian arc at Ecuador and thus verify the true shape of the Earth.
Intrigued by those 240-meter difference, I decided to leave for Calacalí to find what would be the second monument to the middle of the world on my journey, but first I consulted who seemed to be the boss of my young guide, the engineer Raquel Aldaz, who told me He commented that in the country that bears his name, Ecuador has not been without controversy.
how long is the equator
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“We should not talk regarding a millimeter space, in reality we should talk regarding an equatorial strip, or an equinoctial valley, a space that is shared by some museums, some cultural spaces,” Aldaz told BBC Mundo, an idea shared by some of the best-known archaeologists in the country.
In Quito, the archaeologist and anthropologist Holguer Jara would use almost the same words:
“Half the world is an imaginary line, but we should not take it as a line, but rather as a strip, with a width that -according to experts- should be at least 5 km”.
Florencio Delgado, an archaeologist and anthropologist at the University of San Francisco, would use a soccer metaphor with me:
“It’s like tying a rope to a football. If you move the rope a little lower or higher it doesn’t matter. And if you want to spin it thinner, it depends on the thickness of the rope. How wide does it have to be? the equatorial line? Shall we put 100 meters, one meter, 50 centimeters?”
But I was convinced to visit Calacalí, so I hailed a taxi and headed for the small town whose central square, which was covered in a deep fog, houses a monument similar to the one I had already visited, only in a smaller version.
There, stained by disrespectful graffiti, lies the 10-meter structure built by Luis Tufiño 200 years following the arrival of the geodesic mission, to honor European scientists and which would later serve as a model for the one in the City. Half of the world.
But the story did not end there.
line, ball, thread
Back in the Ecuadorian capital, the archaeologist Jara, to my disappointment, repeated to me that “it is a big mistake to demand that they tell us exactly ‘around here’ and to trace the equator line with a very fine-tipped ballpoint pen.”
However, aware of my need to continue searching for that border that separates –or unites- hemispheres, he sent me even further from Quito:
“There is one in Cayambe, which is a ball that people call ‘the ball of the world’. I like this term. They are not with the problem of half the world, but the ball of the world. That monument is for me the most didactic. It makes us understand, both experts and laymen on the subject, that the Earth is round, slightly flattened at the poles (the theory confirmed by European geodesics)”.
Cayambe is the third highest volcano in Ecuador and, they told me there, the only place on Earth where the equinoctial line “touches” the snow. The “ball of the world” is in the region that bears his name and, as it might not be missing in a monument to the middle of the planet, it has a line drawn for one to jump between North and South.
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Caption,
Monument in the shape of a sundial.
A few meters from this ball there is another line that marks the division of the hemispheres, this time in the shape of a sundial, drawn by Cristóbal Cobo, a self-taught researcher fond of archaeoastronomy who does not agree with the idea of the equatorial “strip”.
“If we are talking regarding 40 or 50 years ago, we might be talking regarding a strip, which depended on geographic data. But that is outdated. Now technology can help us delimit with a millimeter of precision. It’s like extending a thread around the world. That’s the current measurement capability.”
From the watch, Cobo takes me to Catequilla, a hill located between the western and eastern cordilleras – whose peaks were used by French geodesists as reference points for their triangulations – where, according to his studies, a pre-Inca archaeological site marks the equinoctial line. .
There, the archaeological ruins are scrawled not by graffiti but by the wheels of the motorcycles that use the hill as a motocross track, and someone has raised a monument that is still waiting for a plaque to find out if it intends, or not, to mark half the world. .
half of what
“Historically, only the work of the French geodesic missions has been considered and the possibility that the indigenous people, before the Spanish conquest, had developed an astronomical awareness, has been underestimated,” Cobo told BBC Mundo.
This researcher considers that Catequilla was used as an astronomical observatory that demonstrates the existence of this awareness among pre-Hispanic groups, but he is not satisfied with this:
“We hope to find evidence that this society did have awareness of zero latitude, but we haven’t found proof of that yet.”
But not everyone shares Cobo’s idea.
Image source Matías Zibell – BBC
Caption,
For the archaeologist Holguer Jara, it is necessary to speak of a strip, not of an equator line.
“I have problems when people say that pre-Columbian cultures were involved in this whole idea of finding 0º 00′ and that they had exactly marked the equator line,” archaeologist Florencio Delgado told me.
“These ancient peoples had a series of ways of conceiving the world, but were they looking for half of the world? Did they have a global idea of the world? Because to find half of something you need to know what something you are talking regarding,” he added.
I, a 21st century inhabitant with a global idea of the planet, did not find a certainty of that half of the world in three days of travel. Faced with my failure, Delgado told me that in the coastal province of Manabí, the inhabitants of the town of Pedernales also want their own monument at the point where the equator leaves the sea and touches the continent.
But my 72 hours were over and the Ecuadorian coast was too far away to continue looking for lines that play hopscotch with the north and south.
*This report was initially published in 2013 and updated in its format for its new publication.
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