MAP – Museums at the Park in Sint‑Niklaas, Belgium consists of four museums, of which this week’s contest was specifically about the Mercator Museum, a compact but renowned museum dedicated to the history of cartography, with a strong focus on Gerard Mercator, the Flemish cartographer whose 16th‑century innovations transformed navigation and mapmaking. Its most valuable pieces are Mercator’s original terrestrial globe from 1541 and celestial globe from 1551, along with early editions of his atlases that introduced the modern concept of a unified “atlas”.
The museum explains the significance of the Mercator projection and shows how it shaped both early navigation and today’s digital mapping systems. Visitors can explore a carefully curated collection of historical maps, globes, and instruments that illustrate how different eras imagined and measured the world.
The museum stands as both a tribute to Mercator’s legacy and a broader introduction to the evolution of global mapmaking.
Those who found it before the hint:
- Eloy Cano
- Graham Hedley
- Martin de Bock
- Lighthouse
- Garfield
- Phil Ower
- Paul Voestermans
And after the hint:
- krenek
- Zorro the Fox