We then visited the Middle of the World, a government-owned park that pays tribute to the Equator. It is surrounded with trinket shops and cafes offering roasted guinea pig. There is a yellow line painted on the ground here that is said to be precisely at Earth’s midpoint — 0 degrees latitude, 0 minutes, 0 seconds.
The government site was chosen because the nearby land where the Equator runs is traversed by a ravine and that the ground there was not suitable to hold a monument, so the builders chose a different location. The current monument, built in 1979, is almost 100 feet high, topped by a globe five feet across. The site first contained a smaller monument, erected in 1936. The builders believed they were placing the monument in the correct spot, except that measuring techniques at the time were not as accurate as they are today, so they were off by a few hundred feet.
according to one of the most commonly used GPS devices, the monument is about 800 feet, or more than two football fields, south of the Equator.
The original monument was built to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the arrival, in what is now Ecuador, of the French Geodesic Mission, an 18th-century scientific expedition intended to help determine whether the earth’s circumference was greater at the Equator or around the poles.
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