Another month, another absolutely massive Street View update. The big news is that Google has launched a wealth of imagery for previously uncovered Mexico; but they’ve also added imagery to Hawaii for the first time, added many new places in the Netherlands, and also provided brand new coverage for huge areas of Spain.

Mexico

In Mexico the cities of Monterrey, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta, Playa del Carmen, Cozumel and Cancun have all received coverage. So far we’ve spotted the world famous Teotihuacan pyramid, complete with people on top (previously covered in 2005):

The world’s largest bullring, which we viewed from above earlier this year.

And one of Mexico’s greatest exports, character piñatas.

Hawaii

Until now Hawaii was the only US state to not have Streetview coverage – but Google has now remedied that by bringing us imagery of main island of Hawaii. Here, covered in a blue tarpaulin, we can see the nose cone of the plane that was used in the opening episode of Lost – which was filmed around here somewhere…

Netherlands

The Netherlands already had excellent coverage, which allowed us to see all sorts of exciting nudity, prostitution, and other Not Safe For Work antics. The latest update goes on to cover Utrecht, Den Haag¹, Eindhoven, Den Bosch, Tilburg, Leeuwarden, Apeldoorn, Deventer and Amersfoort!

All of this means we can now see the brilliant Kubuswoning from ground-level (previously covered in 2006):

The windmills at the popular tourist destination, Kinderdijk, were captured by the Google Trike (turn round for loads more):

Spain

Finally Spain, which already had good coverage, has received an almost total blanket of blue streets. The updates extend right out to the Canary Islands, now covering Mallorca, Gran Canaria and Tenerife.

Here’s the Guggenheim Bilbao, complete with another massive spider (they pop up everywhere on Streetview it seems), which we covered back in 2005:

For continuing Spanish-language coverage of all the new Streetview imagery, you should follow Google Sightseeing Español on Twitter.

Have you found something interesting? Leave a comment below!

November 9 is an important date in German history for a number of reasons, but today we are commemorating an era-defining moment: the fall of the Berlin Wall exactly 20 years ago.

In the weeks leading up to November 1989, both Hungary and Czechoslovakia had relaxed their border controls, and thousands of East Germans fled to the West through those countries. With the division between West Germany and the DDR¹ fatally weakened, the decision was taken to open the border that had been effectively sealed for 28 years.

This was supposed to take place on November 17, but at a press conference on November 9 a government spokesman mistakenly announced that people were free to cross “immediately”. Berliners from both sides flocked to the wall, outnumbering the bewildered border police who at this stage didn’t know what was going on, and of course the rest is history.

The Brandenburg Gate was a symbolic focus for the fall of the Wall. During the Cold War, the gate was isolated in the “death strip” between two walls – the main outer barrier, facing the west, and a smaller inner one. Today, the Brandenburg Gate sits at the heart of the reunited city² and the exact position of the wall is marked by a line of cobblestones set into the road.

Cobbles aside, there’s virtually nothing of the wall left to see here, so the rest of this post will search out a few of the places where it – or its legacy – can still be seen. We begin in the north of the city, in the district of Pankow. Here, the “death strip” clearly stands out as a sea of trees that have grown up since the border guards left. A few small sections of wall also still exist here, and, a little way to the south, a few very overgrown Blumenschalensperre – barricades disguised as concrete urns filled with flowers.

Also still visible in many places is the track that was used to patrol the border. One of the best preserved sections is beside Schulzestrasse, where the tall lamp posts that originally illuminated the “death strip” can clearly be seen.

At Bernauer Strasse, the border was formed by the walls of the buildings on the southern side of the street – the apartments were in East Germany; the street itself was in the West. Consequently, it was the scene of many escape attempts. To prevent this, the authorities first bricked up the windows and finally evacuated the residents and demolished the buildings along the border. Today, its southern side still largely empty, Bernauer Strasse is home to various memorials to the wall. The Chapel of Reconcilation was opened in 2000 on the site of a former church, which was isolated in no man’s land for years before being demolished in 1985. Just across the street is the Berlin Wall Documentation Centre.

Nearby, the border twists and turns so that near the Nordbahnhof station, West Berlin is actually east of East Berlin! Again, a few stretches of wall are still visible – these were part of the “hinterland wall”, the smaller barrier behind the main wall.

The longest stretch of wall still standing is known as the East Side Gallery, and we’ve featured it before. The imagery has improved somewhat since then, although of course it’s still much better appreciated from ground level!

There’s another well preserved length of wall on Niederkirchnerstrasse, not far from the infamous Checkpoint Charlie (although the checkpoint you can see today is only a reconstruction).

Our last stop in Berlin is something of an oddity. Steinstücken, a community of about 200 people in the southwest of the city, was once an exclave of the West, entirely surrounded by the DDR. Once the wall was built, its inhabitants were entirely cut off, and could only visit the rest of West Berlin by passing through two East German checkpoints on each visit. This situation lasted for 10 years before a thin sliver of land was exchanged, attaching the exclave to the rest of West Berlin. Although the wall is long gone, the border between Berlin and Brandenburg still follows the same convoluted path today, including the strip barely 20 metres wide.

Although Berlin was the most famous divided German community, it wasn’t the only one. The border between East and West Germany also cut through other, smaller towns. Among them was the village of Mödlareuth, which is divided between Bavaria, in the West, and Thuringia, in the East. The wall was built here in 1966, five years after that in Berlin, and a small part of it has been preserved as an open-air museum, complete with a helicopter and some tanks.

As you can probably gather, there are a huge amount of wall-related things to see in Berlin, and we could fill dozens of posts with them. Fortunately, a superb German site does a far better job than we would, with a vast store of photos, maps and other information, accessed through a Google Maps interface. It’s only available in German, but there’s plenty to look at even if you can’t read the text. Also check out the fascinating “Wall Traces” section at Berlin’s official website.

Thanks to fellow GSS authors Jenni and Cédric for respectively suggesting and contributing to this post.

Where the North Sea meets the Baltic Sea¹, there’s Grenen²; a spectacularly unspectacular sandbank at the northern end of Jutland, the continental part of Denmark.

The form and position of the sandbank’s tip can vary considerably over short periods of time, when waves³ and currents remove or deposit sand.

On the long term however, Grenen is growing by almost a kilometre (roughly half a mile) per century, slowly extending towards the north east. A closer look at the aerial picture shows distinct stripes in the landscape: successive layers of silt and sand that have accumulated over time.

Of great importance is the 46m (150ft) high lighthouse close to the tip.

Despite the increasing use of advanced navigational systems, the lighthouse is still crucial to the safe passage of more than 100,000 ships that pass Grenen every year.

Due to its prominent position in between seas, the location has also been of great military interest for many years. What remains today are several very sturdy concrete fortifications and artillery positions built by the Germans during World War II.

These structures are part of the huge Atlantic Wall project, a chain of coastal defences built by the German Third Reich that runs from southern France to the northern end of Norway. The Wall was never completely finished, and save its French parts never saw much use.

A little further to the south lies the “Tilsandede Kirke“, or “silted up church“. Built around the 12th century, it was the region’s most important church.

However, beginning in the 16th century, it had to regularly be dug out of the sand that amassed around it, and was finally given up in 1795. Its main building was torn down to reuse the building materials, while the church’s tower remains as a historical site.

Grenen today is a popular leisure destination⁴ and a nature reserve, protecting the region’s distinct vegetation including several kinds of orchids. It is also a popular site for bird spotters looking for passing eagles, ospreys, cranes, storks and ernes, amongst many others.

We featured the Greenwich meridian two years ago on Google Sightseeing, so it’s about time we had a closer look at the other global zero: the equator.

Although it is more than 40,000km long, there are surprisingly few towns along the line – much of its length consists of ocean, and on land it crosses large expanses of tropical rainforest.

We start our journey, appropriately enough, in the country named after its location: Ecuador. Perhaps the best known monument marking the equator is Mitad del Mundo (Middle of the World), just outside the capital, Quito. These days, GPS-laden tourists are often alarmed to find that the true zero line appears to be 240 metres north of the line on the ground.

It’s all a question of which map datum¹ you use: The Global Positioning System, along with most online maps, uses the WGS84 datum. So, in the same way that the Greenwich meridian is 100 metres or so away from GPS 0° longitude, the GPS equator (shown in red below) is somewhat north of the Mitad del Mundo line (in blue).

Just to the northeast of the offical Mitad del Mundo monument is a small private museum called Inti-Ñan, which claims to be on the “real” equator. It is, but only on an older datum called SAD69 (shown in yellow). Your GPS won’t read zero until you walk into the main road outside.

Heading eastwards through Ecuador, we soon come to the highest point on the equator, and the only place on the line with permanent snow cover: Volcán Cayambe. The summit, just inside the northern hemisphere, is 5,790 metres above sea level; the highest point on the equator itself is some 1,100 metres lower.

On the other side of South America, in the city of Macapá in Brazil, we find a football² stadium supposedly built right on the equator, with one half of the pitch in each hemisphere. This is the Estádio Milton Corrêa, better known as the Zerão (”Big Zero”), and it’s only slightly marred by the fact that the WGS84 equator actually runs just past the southern end of the pitch. A little way to the east, along Avenida Equatorial, is a monument known as Marco Zero.

Next we cross the Atlantic to Africa. A popular tourist stop in Kenya is this layby on the outskirts of Nanyuki, where a sign (arrowed) marks the location of the equator. In this case it’s pretty accurate, being just 20 metres or so south of the WGS84 line. You can usually find enterprising locals here willing, for a few shillings, to “demonstrate” how water flows down the plughole in opposite directions either side of the line. However, it’s an urban myth and the demonstration is all down to sleight of hand.

Our last location is in Indonesia, in Pontianak on the island of Borneo. Built in 1990, the Equator Monument is a replica of the marker first erected in the 1920s by Dutch surveyors. It’s five times the size of the original, but again it’s disappointing to note that it is 120 metres too far north, according to GPS.

One final Google oddity – if you search for the location “0,0″, then as you’d expect you get a placemark at the intersection of the equator and the Greenwich meridian, off the coast of west Africa. What’s more unexpected is the address that is given: 23208 Glenbrook St, St Clair Shores, Michigan. Is this unassuming neighbourhood the real centre of the universe?

It’s been a while since we’ve posted here about updated images in Google Earth and Maps, but Google have been steadily rolling out new updates every few months, usually with a short quiz relating to the new locations.

However, today’s announcement is a little different as they’ve promised to not only increase the frequency of updates¹, but also provide exhaustive detail, via a KML file, of exactly which areas have been added or updated. This is great news for Google Sightseeing, as we’re always looking for new sights to feature.

Updated locations are highlighted in red

The Google Earth team have also challenged you to find the best sights on the new imagery and share them on twitter using the #GearthIMG hashtag. We’ve already posted a couple, and will keep an eye on the findings.

Remember, you can also follow us on Twitter to keep up with the latest Google Earth, Maps, and #streetview posts.