Challenge: Geolocation exercise by Sofia Santos
So today, I decided to challenge myself with a geolocation exercise from Sofia Santos’s website. This is a walkthrough of how I found the location, so if you want to challenge yourself with the same picture, don’t read further or you will encounter some spoilers.
Ok, I need to geolocate this picture, so let’s analyze it. The first thing I can see is the name “Kiffa”, so let’s Google it. Kiffa (كيفة) is a city in Mauritania famous for its pearls. At the moment, I don’t need to know more about the city, but at least I know in which part of the world the picture was taken. Now I will work on the picture and see if I can gather more information
The picture is very blurry, so it’s difficult to gather information, even when using Google Lens as it compares the picture with ones from a different country.
Nevertheless, I am able to isolate three different pieces of information that may help me find the solution. As you can see, I’ve highlighted three different points in the picture, each with a different color.
Red: The street seems to lead into an area that doesn’t have any buildings, so I can assume it’s one of the streets leading out of the city. It’s still unclear whether it’s a main road or not. However, it could lead us to the location by taking a virtual walk on Google Maps.
Yellow: There are some sort of writings, though I can’t understand what they are. The building is distinctive, so I need to keep it in consideration.
Blue: This information is purely an assumption and is likely the least probable, but to me, those structures look like “public toilets”. I will just keep this in mind.
Also, between the red and blue points, there is a short wall, and the buildings are not tall at all. Let’s navigate a bit on Google Maps.
I can identify five streets that lead out of town. I could check all of them, but these appear to be main streets (I suppose), so I would like to have more information about these roads. In the previous picture, another crucial detail is the presence of trees. Unfortunately, I can’t use Street View on this map, and all the streets I’ve mentioned don’t seem likely to be the one I’m looking for. Let’s return to the tweet for a moment.
- 45 pm, Feb 20, 2013 is the date of the tweet. So, what I’m looking for on the map might be totally different from the landscape in 2013. Hence, I will switch to Google Earth.
Welcome to Kiffa in 2013, courtesy of Google Earth and its tool for viewing old imagery.
I keep going back and forth between the original picture and what I can see, and I notice this pole, probably for the telephone line. Using Google Maps, I check the few pictures that are present in Street View.
Both of these images are from 2014, a year after our picture was taken, so they might be useful. What’s interesting is that one picture shows the line (telephone or electrical), while the other does not.The imagery from Google Earth isn’t clear enough, so I’m going to look at Yandex Maps. I’m surprised to see that the pole is different from the one in the Twitter picture. Could I be looking at the wrong part of the world?Searching for these poles doesn’t yield any results, and the area is too large to use check all the possible locations without loosing something. I could try to find the tweet, but I want to leave that as a last resort.
Returning to the tweet, I notice another potential clue — “Newcomers”. Could this mean people have just arrived in the city?
I’m starting to consider different possibilities:
- Tourists
- Workers coming from another city
- People arriving from the airport
Could it be that one of the buildings is a bus stop? or the street from the airport? Let’s go back to Google Maps and Google earth.
Additionally, the street I’m looking for has pavement.
Looking on Google Earth, this point could be the location. The street has pavement, it bends a bit to the right, and it leads from the airport. Additionally, there are trees lining the route to the airport. The people appear to be coming from the area with the trees. Furthermore, there’s a tree behind the building marked in blue, and the buildings match the ones in the picture.
16°36'34.44"N
11°23'52.24"O
P.S. It’s the correct location. I later checked Sofia’s walkthrough and found that I was right. Her process was more refined, especially because she checked for the presence of the pole. It was a very fun and challenging exercise.
