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The Middle of the World Is 240 Metres That Way

1. Ecuador's most famous monument marks the equator, and it is in the wrong place.

Mitad del Mundo — Middle of the World — stands 26 kilometres north of Quito: a 30-metre trapezoidal monument topped with a globe, built in 1979 to replace an earlier one from 1936. A yellow line runs up the walkway and through the structure, marking zero degrees latitude. It is one of Ecuador's most visited attractions.

Modern GPS puts the true equator about 240 metres — roughly 787 feet — north of that line.

2. It was not a mistake so much as the limit of eighteenth-century instruments.

The position was fixed by the French Geodesic Mission of 1736, led by Charles-Marie de La Condamine, which had come to South America to measure the shape of the Earth and confirm that it bulges at the equator. They did that successfully. They were also, by the standards of the time, remarkably close.

Two hundred and forty metres out of forty million is an error of about 0.0006%.

3. The site that claims to be on the "real" equator may also be off.

The nearby Intiñan Museum, established after GPS revealed the discrepancy, markets itself as the true line. Some measurements suggest it too is out — perhaps 50 metres.

So there are two equator monuments within walking distance of each other, and by the strictest reading neither is exactly on it.

4. This is not the only zero line in the wrong place.

The brass strip at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, which millions of people photograph themselves straddling, sits about 102 metres from where the modern reference meridian actually falls — for a different but related reason, involving local gravity and the shift from astronomical to satellite measurement.

Humanity's two most photographed lines — 0° latitude and 0° longitude — are both marked a couple of hundred metres from the real thing.

The clock: Quito sits within a few kilometres of the equator, which gives it the most regular sky on Earth. Sunrise and sunset land near six o'clock, every day, all year, with almost no seasonal variation at all. There is nothing here for daylight saving to save, and Ecuador does not use it.

The city itself is at about 78.5° west, on UTC−5, which is built for the 75th meridian, leaving Quito roughly fourteen minutes ahead of its own solar noon.

So: a city with the most predictable daylight in the world, next to a monument celebrating the line that produces it, standing 240 metres from the line.

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