The Middle of the World monument in Ecuador is in the wrong place: what is the real story

Ecuador is the country that gives its name to the imaginary line that allows the division of the northern and southern hemispheres of the Earth. The line passes through Quito, the capital, where one of the most important tourist attractions is the Middle of the World complex. But most tourists are unaware that, in reality, the most accurate measurements have determined that the true half of the world is more than 200 meters from that place.

In 1936, Luis Tufiño, an Ecuadorian geographer built the first monument in the Middle of the World. More than 40 years later, in 1979, the monument was relocated 7 kilometers west of its origin and taken to Calacali, a parish in Quito. By 1981, construction had already begun on the Middle of the World City, where a 30-meter-high monument was placed and a line was drawn to simulate the equator line. This resort opened its doors to the public in 1992 and since then thousands of tourists have come to the place to be able to set foot in every hemisphere of the planet.

In the Middle of the World City, visitors can see samples of Ecuadorian art, observe handicrafts and enjoy traditional cuisine.

In addition to its tourist objective, the Middle of the World City complex was created as a commemoration of the 18th century Franco-Hispanic Geodetic Mission, which visited Ecuador and determined the site where zero latitude is marked. Even the entrance to the monument has sculpted busts with the members of the mission. There are also pavilions honoring the countries that participated in that tour.

However, the measurement of those geodesics was not as accurate and a tourist complex was built in the wrong place, since the true half of the world is on the top of Mount Catequilla, located 240 meters south, as had already been determined by the indigenous people of the area and was later confirmed by new more accurate measurements.

Catequilla Hill is an archaeological site from where you can see all the archaeological sites of the region and more than 20 urban sites with pre-Hispanic backgrounds. The name of the place would demonstrate the presence of the Incas in the area.

The indigenous cosmogony, which found in the middle of the world a precise place for its rituals, was not entirely ignored. In the 1990s, two alternative museums were created to refer to the equatorial line, one in San Antonio de Pichincha and another in Cayambe, in the shadow of the volcano of the same name.

The museum of San Antonio de Pichincha is called Inti Ñan and is located 750 meters from the city Middle of the World. The founder of the museum was Fabian Vera. Inti ñan means “path of the sun”. The land on which the museum stands is crossed by the equinox line, as can be seen by more accurate GPS measurements.

The Inti-Ñan Museum honors solar cultures and includes a totemic exhibition with icons belonging to the heliocentric religions that exist on the continent. On the site you can see two huts built in the 19th century, but which were rehabilitated in the nineties.

In an article published by Academician Ernesto Capello, the testimony of Fabián Vera is collected, who explains that the first festivities of the equinox were held in the place where the Inti Ñan Museum is located, an aboriginal tradition in the Lulumbamba valley, now San Antonio de Pichincha, took place.

Vera, who has studied indigenous traditions and rituals, highlights the originality of pre-Columbian peoples, showing as a reference the landmarks of the landscape and states that Ecuadorian indigenous people were ahead of geodetic measurements, however their ancestral knowledge, which managed to determine key elements about the location and shape of the Earth, were relegated by Western concepts of science.

“The only thing that the geodetic missions did is to adapt the knowledge of the West, to adapt to the ancestral knowledge that they had already observed and calculated thousands of years ago here in Quito and in Ecuador. That is why the points of the equatorial zone and its archaeological geography, in the Middle of the World, were heliolatric points calculated earlier than thousands of years ago,” says Vera, according to Capello. These calculations helped the indigenous people to build solar temples or perform exact triangulations where “they could observe the exact dates of an equinox or solstice, the exact dates of the position of a star or planet”. For Vera, “when Western civilizations came, with other names, they simply changed them, because everything was done”.

The founder of the Inti Ñan Site Museum, where experiments can be carried out that would demonstrate the influence of being on half the world, says that the indigenous people already knew that the Earth was round: “By simple observation that the sun was rising at the foot of the Cayambe, for example, and it hid at the foot of the hill of La Marca. And that distance that today we call “kilometers”, our indigenous people called it the chaquis of the Inti-Ñan. How many feet did the sun travel over the equatorial line. So, they already had it calculated.” Vera argues that “when geodetic missions came, they left landmarks on indigenous landmarks.”

The equatorial line crosses Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil in America and several countries in Africa. The knowledge of the ancestral Ecuadorian populations calculated, without the technology of geodesics or that of our times, accurately the places where the terrestrial hemispheres separate. However, discarding their findings have led to confusion such as building a tourist monument in the wrong place.

KEEP READING: