The mysterious journey to the island that doesn’t exist but you have already visited without knowing
They often evoke paradisiacal beaches or remote territories, but there is one in particular that breaks all schemes. And, although it is not real, you have probably been there more times than you remember. All thanks to a link that connects your searches to a very specific point on the planet.
An island invented by the map
It does not appear in tourist catalogs, nor could it. It is a special coordinate located at the point where the zero meridian crosses the equator: 0°N, 0°E, in the Gulf of Guinea. It is the “origin point” of the GPS system, a mathematical place that serves as a reference to plot any position on the planet. However, its fame came when millions of devices started “traveling” there by mistake whenever a search did not find a destination.
A piece of ocean with a buoy
If you were to sail to the coordinates of , you would not see sand or palm trees. The only thing you would find is Station 13010 – Soul, a buoy from the PIRATA system that collects data on winds, temperatures, and humidity for global climate models. In the physical world, is just this floating device. In the virtual world, it is the dumping ground for GPS erroneous coordinates.
How the digital myth was born
officially emerged in 2011, when a team of cartographers added to public domain maps a fictitious “country” of one square meter, created to identify geolocation failures. Since then, it has become a recurring point in millions of faulty searches, symbolizing that moment when technology loses its way and sends us to the center of the planet.
Why you have probably been there already
Every time your phone shows a nonexistent location or fails to find an address, it automatically sends you to the coordinates 0,0. , even if you never leave home. An imaginary destination, born of cartography and digital errors, that we have all visited without buying a ticket.
