Accra

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A City That Actually Sits on the Line It Keeps Time By

1. The Prime Meridian passes through Tema, 25 kilometres east of Accra.

Zero degrees longitude — the line that defines Greenwich Mean Time — runs directly through a Ghanaian port city whose coordinates read 05°40′N 00°00′W.

2. And Ghana keeps Greenwich Mean Time.

UTC+0, year-round, one zone, no daylight saving. Which makes Accra one of a very small number of capitals that runs on a clock calibrated to a line it can actually walk to. The city itself sits at about 0.2° west, essentially on its own zone meridian — its clock and its sun reach midday within a couple of minutes of each other.

3. Ghana is the closest country on Earth to 0°, 0°.

The point where the Prime Meridian crosses the Equator lies in the Gulf of Guinea, off Ghana's southeastern coast. No nation's land is nearer to it.

The closest land-based point is inside the Meridian Port Services container terminal at Tema, where the line enters the site at 5°37′35″N and exits at the beach at 5°37′30″N. A monument called The Meridian Rock was placed there to mark it.

It has since been lost.

4. Meanwhile the port it stood in handles 80% of Ghana's imports.

Tema is Ghana's largest seaport, nicknamed the Harbour City, and it serves not only Ghana but the landlocked interior — Burkina Faso, Mali and beyond. Ghana and neighbouring Côte d'Ivoire together produce more than half the world's cocoa. Ghana first exported it in 1891; it became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in 1957.

The clock: it is worth putting Accra next to two other cities on this site.

London built the line. Its brass marker at Greenwich sits about 102 metres from where the modern reference meridian actually falls.

Quito marks the equator with a monument standing about 240 metres from the true line.

Accra sits on the meridian, keeps the time named after it, and the monument that marked the nearest land to the centre of the coordinate system is gone.

Three cities, three of the most important lines humans have drawn on the planet, and not one of them has a marker in quite the right place.

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