Famous Tourist Attractions That Aren’t What They Seem

Few attractions make their purpose clearer than Ecuador’s Mitad del Mundo, where a large monument celebrates the geographical division between hemispheres. Visitors traditionally pose with one foot on either side of a painted line marking latitude zero and photograph themselves supposedly standing in both hemispheres. Modern GPS measurements, however, place the actual equator a short distance away from the monumental line commonly shown in tourist photographs. The discrepancy comes from the eighteenth-century surveying work used to establish the historically celebrated location long before satellite positioning existed. The monument therefore represents an important chapter in the scientific measurement of Earth even though its famous line is not geographically exact. Nearby attractions have capitalized on the discrepancy by emphasizing alternative locations claimed to correspond more closely with modern equatorial measurements.