Every Day Is Special: Ecuador

Showing posts with label Ecuador. Show all posts

September 26 - Flag Day in Ecuador

Posted on September 26, 2019

Today is not the anniversary of the adoption of Ecuador's tricolor flag, as you might imagine, but rather the anniversary of it being reinstated as the flag in 1860.

Like many other nations, a variety of flags have flown over Ecuador. When the Spanish first conquered the territory, they founded the city of Quito (now the capital) and of course flew the flag of the Spanish Empire. When wars of independence were sweeping through the empire, rebels flew a red flag, but when the nation was first founded, a flag with blue and white stripes and stars was created.

The tricolor flag was an altogether other banner. In the early 1800s, a large, powerful nation was formed by joining up what is now Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and parts of Peru, Guyana, and Brazil. It was called Gran Colombia, and it had a flag with yellow, blue, and red stripes, plus a coat of arms.

Even though Gran Colombia only existed for a bit more than one decade, three nations have kept the basic tricolor flag, with some changes:

Colombia

Notice that Colombia's modern flag is similar to
Gran Colombia's flag, but it has a double-wide
top stripe and no coat of arms in the middle.

Ecuador

Ecuador's flag is pretty identical to Colombia's,
but it has the nation's coat of arms in the middle.

Venezuela

Venezuela's flag goes back to Gran Colombia's
same-size stripes but adds stars in the middle
and has its own coat of arms in one corner.

The thing is, during the middle of the 1800s, Ecuador had a period of time, the March Revolution, during which the flag was returned to blue-and-white-with-stars. This was a time of a dispute with Peru over territory, and basically a time of civil war.

After a battle between the two forces, Gabriel Garcia Moreno became the leader of Ecuador and reinstated the Gran Colombia tricolor flag.

Celebrating flags is one thing - but celebrating Ecuador itself can be so much more:

Also on this date:

Revolution Day in Yemen

Anniversary of the premiere of Gilligan's Island

Composer George Gershwin's birthday

Show-whale “Shamu”s birthday

AKA Shamu Day

JohnnyAppleseed's birthday

Anniversary of new Dominions joining the British Empire

Birthday of tennis great Serena Williams

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

April 13 – Teacher's Day in Ecuador

Posted on April 13, 2019

Ecuador - the South American nation whose name means "equator," a nation which lies on the equator (no surprise!), one of only two South American nations that don't border on Brazil.

Ecuador celebrates teachers on the birthday of one of the nation's outstanding authors: Juan Montalvo was born on this date in 1832.

Here are some special things about Ecuador:

It's one of the 18 "megadiverse" countries in the world. There are many different kinds of habitats in Ecuador, including high-altitude mountains and low-lying rainforests, the far-flung Galápagos Islands and the productive coastlands. So it's no surprise that the plants and animals are varied as well...

What is a surprise, perhaps, is that Ecuador has a constitution that specifically gives "nature," or the ecosystem, legal rights. It's the first nation in the world to acknowledge the Rights of Nature.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites are places that have cultural, historical, or scientific importance. They are legally protected for all of humanity by international treaties. At this point, there are more than 1,000 World Heritage Sites...but when the first conference was held in 1978 to choose the first few sites, the very first one was Ecuador's Galapagos Islands, and the very second one was Ecuador's capital city, Quito.

All these years later, Ecuador only has five World Heritage Sites, a number dwarfed by world leaders Italy (54) and China (53). But it's amazing that the very first two sites were located in the teeny nation of Ecuador!

Also on this date:

Songkran in Thailand

Anniversary of the coining of the word “microscope”

National Scrabble Day

Thomas Jefferson's birthday

Apollo 13 Day

Anniversary of the arrival of the first elephant in the U.S.

Anniversary of a Pulitzer won and lost

Anniversary of the founding of NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art

Birthday of Eli Terry, the "Henry Ford of Clocks"!

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

October 9 – Independence Day in Guayaquil, Ecuador

Posted on October 9, 2015

In Ecuador's fight to break free of its Spanish rulers, one city broke away before the others—and declared itself an independent city-state.

The good news is that this ousting of the Spanish authorities was almost bloodless. The Spaniards were arrested, not killed. Quite civilized – especially for the time.

That was October 9, 1820. Since then Guayaquil (which is Ecuador's largest city and most important port, but NOT its capital city) has been celebrating its own independence in October as well as the independence of the entire nation in August 10. Here are two photos from a recent Guayaquil Independence parade:

To learn more about Guayaquil, check out this recent post.

The Equator in Ecuador

You probably know that the name Ecuador refers to the Equator, the imaginary line that circles the middle of the Earth.

That means that you can stand in a certain place in Ecuador and have one foot in the Northern Hemisphere and the other foot in the Southern Hemisphere.

Did you also know that the Earth bulges outward a bit in the center? That means that the Equator is just a bit farther away from the center of the Earth than places north and south of the Equator. In other words, Earth is not a perfect sphere, but is instead an “oblate spheroid.”

This diagram shows what an oblate spheroid is.
Of course, Earth's middle bulge isn't NEARLY as
exaggerated as this one!

\Way back in the late 1600s, Isaac Newton suggested that Earth would be an oblate spheroid – a bit squashed at the poles and a bit swollen at the equator. He wasn't able to accurately measure and check his hypothesis, but it turns out that the difference is about 13 miles (21 km). Sounds like a lot, but of course this difference is swamped by the size of the Earth, which has a diameter of almost 8,000 miles (more than 12,000 km). That's why our planet looks pretty darned round from space.

Still, Ecuador's highest mountain, Chimborazo, is the farthest point on the Earth's surface from the Earth's center. It's height of 20,564 feet – and, don't get me wrong! That's high! That's higher than the highest peak in all of North America, Denali! – still doesn't even get it into the highest 100 elevations in the world. BUT, when you add those 13 miles of the equatorial bulge – bam! Chimborazo is the record holder!

Interestingly enough, although Spanish is the official language of Ecuador, and Ecuador is Spanish for “Equator,” people in Ecuador don't normally call the Equator by their country's name. Too confusing, I'm sure! Instead, they call it “Middle of the World,” or Mitad del Mundo.

At the Mitad del Mundo monument in Quito, people can climb to the top and get a great vista of both hemispheres...But, it turns out, the monument isn't actually built on the Equator! A mistake was made in 1982, when the monument was being constructed, and our current technology is able to tell us in no uncertain terms that the actual Equator is about 100 meters (300 feet) away from the monument!

Well...that's okay! Twice the photo ops, right? People get their photo taken straddling the false, 1982-era Equator...

...and the actual Equator.

And you know what's cool? You can walk along the real Equator and see a bunch of demos and experiments that show the effects of being exactly on the Equator.