The Ciudad Mitad del Mundo (, Middle of the World City) is a tract of land owned by the prefecture of the province of Pichincha, Ecuador. It is located at San Antonio parish of the canton of Quito, north of the center of Quito. The grounds contain the Monument to the Equator, which highlights the exact location of the Equator (from which the country takes its name) and commemorates the eighteenth century Franco-Spanish Geodesic Mission which fixed its approximate location; they also contain the Museo Etnográfico Mitad del Mundo, Ethnographic Museum Middle of the Earth, a museum about the indigenous people ethnography of Ecuador. The monument was constructed between 1979 and 1982 by Architect and Contractor Alfredo Fabián Páez with Carlos Mancheno President of Pichincha's Province Council to replace an older, smaller monument built by the Government of Ecuador under the direction of the geographer Luis Tufiño in 1936. It is made of iron and concrete and covered with cut and polished andesite stone. The monument was built to commemorate the first Geodesic Mission of the French Academy of Sciences, led by Louis Godin, Pierre Bouguer and Charles Marie de La Condamine, who, in the year 1736, conducted experiments to test the flattening at the poles of the characteristic shape of the Earth, by comparing the distance between a degree meridian in the equatorial zone to another level measured in Sweden. The older monument was moved to a small town near there called Calacalí. The UNASUR former headquarters is located in this place, but is now in disuse following Ecuador's withdrawal from the organization in 2019. Contrary to popular belief, there are only two points of interest positioned exactly on the equator: the Catequilla archaeological site, and the Quitsato Sundial. The French Geodesic Mission The placement of the equatorial line was defined throughout a 1736 expedition called the French Geodesic Mission. While such studies would later determine the exact measure and shape of the world, astronomers involved missed the possibility of encountering the remnants of highly sophisticated geographical achievements made on “Equatorial” territory for hundreds of years before their arrival. Throughout the time the astronomers attempted to measure a length of a degree of latitude on that part of the planet, a group of different sorts of ruins (built by the Quitu-Cara culture) were found nearby the territory where they thought the Equatorial line passed through. Years after that, it