Ejercicio 2 · Multiple choice: el mapa equivocado a propósito

The map that was wrong on purpose

For most of the twentieth century, cartographers protected their work by hiding small errors inside it: a street that did not exist, a bend in a river that was slightly too sharp, a village invented and dropped into an empty field. If a rival map contained the same invention, the copying was obvious. The technique was known, without much affection, as a trap street.

Anna Behrens, who spent eleven years at a Dutch map company, is careful about how she describes them. «People like the idea that we were being playful,» she says. «We were not. It was a legal instrument, and a rather boring one. Nobody sat around inventing charming villages. You put in something dull enough that no reader would ever go looking for it.»

That last point mattered more than it sounds. A trap that sent drivers down a road that did not exist would be worse than useless, so the errors had to be harmless: a footpath in a wood, a name on a field. The best traps, Behrens says, were the ones that were technically true but unnecessary, which meant that even in court the company could argue it had not lied to anyone.

Digital mapping has made the practice largely pointless. Satellite images can be compared automatically, and copying is now detected by software rather than by a cartographer noticing a familiar mistake. What has survived is the folklore. Every few years a newspaper reports that a fictional village has been discovered on an old map, and Behrens receives three or four emails from strangers asking her to confirm that the place is real. She never answers those emails, she says, because the honest reply would spoil something people clearly enjoy.