MITAD DEL MUNDO

The Middle of the World lies beyond the village of Pomasqui, past dry hills scarred by gravel quarries, at the gate of the village of San Antonio del Pichincha. Just before San Antonio, a long, paved pedestrian avenue slopes up to the left to the base of a massive monument resting almost smack on the equator.

  A huge globe tops the square pedestal, which is bisected by a bright red line marking the planet’s waistline. Here’s your chance to shake hands or kiss from two different hemispheres, or pose with one foot on either side of the equator. An elevator inside the monument will take you to the top for a view of the encircling hills. You descend on foot through an excellent ethnographic museum (tel. 2/2395-637, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. Mon.–Thurs., 9 a.m.–7 p.m. Fri. and Sat., $1 pp) filled with clothing, artwork, and reams of information on Ecuador’s indigenous cultures. Free tours are available in English and Spanish.

  In the Disney-style “tourist village” next to the monument are numerous gift shops and traditional restaurants, a bullring, and a scale to find out if you really weigh less when you’re this far from the center of the earth (since it bulges at the middle). Tourist agencies offer package tours to Pululahua and Rumicucho. Calimatours (tel. 2/2394-796 or 2/2394-797) has tours leaving daily for $6 pp, minimum four people.

  Along the avenue, which is lined with busts of members of La Condamine’s expedition, is a mediocre planetarium and a surprisingly neat model of colonial Quito in the Fundación Quito Colonial (tel. 2/2394-319, 9:30 a.m.–5 p.m. daily, $1 pp). The three-square-meter model took almost seven years to build, at a scale of three blocks to one meter with labeled streets. Make sure to stay for “sunrise” and “sunset,” which arrive complete with tiny lights and sound effects. Models of Cuenca, Guayaquil, and various old ships are also part of the display.

  The Heroes del Cenepa monument near the entrance is dedicated to the soldiers killed in border fighting with Peru in 1995, and the French Museum southeast of the monument traces the story of the ill-fated equator expedition. Admission is free with a ticket to the ethnographic museum. You might have your bubble burst at the Solar Culture Museum south of the monument, whose organizers claim that the real equator line actually goes through the ruins barely visible at a dot on Cataquilla Hill to the southeast. The computerized presentation on the archaeoastronomy of Ecuador’s prehistoric sites is quite interesting.

  Northeast of the complex—exit and head left along the outside of the wall—is the excellent Museo de Sitio Inti-ñan (tel. 2/2395-122, 9:30 a.m.–6 p.m. daily, $0.30 pp). Its name means “Museum of the Path of the Sun” in Quechua, and the family that owns and operates it has done a good job with the collection, which includes displays on local plants, indigenous cultures, and even a live Galápagos tortoise. You’ll hear yet another claim of the exact equator line, which they say goes right through the museum (and will pull out a GPS to prove it).

  To get here, catch a Mitad del Mundo bus along Avenida América, or take the Ecovia to where América intersects near Cotocallao. In the future, buses to the Mitad del Mundo will come only to this interchange and not all the way into the city.