By Nora Vasconcelos
Ever since I can remember I’ve loved maps.
When I was a little girl I was thrilled when I found in my books colourful illustrations of foreign lands, even when they where imaginary ones.
I used to spend a long time looking carefully at all the details that those maps contained, divisions between lands, between the earth and the skies, between the skies and the oceans and among all the oceans that covered the known land and the ship routs to reach them.
Those maps took my mind traveling miles away and keep it there for a long time.
As I grew up, I started to enjoy those fantastic Atlas full of old legends and legendary creatures.
And just a few years later, I made a habit of looking up any new place that appeared in the books I was reading back then. So, a Globe and an illustrated dictionary were always at hand. I just couldn’t let it pass, I had to know exactly where those places were!
Nowadays, technology has given us the huge advantage of the Internet, with which looking up places is really fast, the same as getting several maps of any given destination when a trip is coming soon.
The Internet has become a great travelling tool. And, as I always say ‘a map will set you free‘, so to me is quite normal to read as many maps as possible of my new destination and then, with all that information in my head, I just give myself the wonderful chance to wander around without getting lost.
But even with all these wonderful advantages, I always melt when I see an old map.
This is way I got so so happy when I came across the amazing David Rumsey Map Collection. A website that let visitors find thousands of maps, divided in different categories.
These maps are not only beautiful, but also full of information, so much that a whole vacation could be completed without leaving home, only with the unique power of very detailed illustrations and descriptions, and the immense power of the imagination.