Tourist Attraction in San Antonio de Pichincha:
Mitad del Mundo
Ciudad Mitad del Mundo is an area of the property of the municipality of the province of Pichincha, Ecuador. She is located in the parish of San Antonio, in the canton of Quito, 26 miles north of the city centre of Quito. The place is the headquarters of the "Museo ethnographic ciudad mitad del mundo", a museum about the indigenous ethnography of Ecuador. The Monument of 30 meters high in the area was built between 1979 and 1982 by the council of the province of pichincha to replace a monument more old and smaller than it was built by the government of Ecuador, under the direction of the geographer Luis Tufino In 1936, to mark the point where it is believed that the equator crossing the country. The structure is made of steel and concrete and is covered with andesite polished. The Monument was built to commemorate the first geodesic mission of the French Academy of sciences, by Louis Godin, Pierre Bouguer and Charles Marie De La Condamine, which, in the year 1736, conducted experiments to test the flattening in the format of the poles Earth, comparing the distance between a meridian in the equatorial zone with another measure in Sweden. The oldest monument was moved seven miles to a small town called calacalí. The head office of the Secretary-General of the union of South American Nations (Unasur) is also on site. Contrary to popular belief, there are only two points positioned exactly on the equator: the archaeological site of Catequilla and the sundial of Quitsato.
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